THE YAKHA: CULTURE, ENVIRONMENT AND DEVELOPMENT IN ...

increasingly short supply and this caused real hardships for people,
even in villages which were traditionally seen as self-sufficient,
Prices rose in accordance with a black market and the laws of supply and
demand: kerosene from 15 NRs a litre to 30 NRs a litre, sugar from 7%
NRs to 14 NRs a kilo. Apa used his contacts to get supplies for the
village from wherever he could. 200kg of sugar arrived from the Madi
Rambeni co-operative society (which acted for the whole valley) at the
beginning of October 1989, and four barrels of kerosene arrived from
Basantapur at about the same time, These were dispensed through the
pancayat office rather than the shops,
The 'trade and transit' dispute was not the only source of
discontent in the community as Dasai- approached in September 1989.
Another problem was that the teachers had not been paid, apparently
because the bank in Madi Kambeni had not been authorised to dispense the
money. The headmaster went off to try and sort things out, but did not
return for many days. Some of the people from further afield who had to
get away for the holidays got their pay, but the more local teachers did
not. It seemed 1 ike many promises the government made were not being
met, For example, the cadastral survey (napi) had been due to arrive
throughout the period of our fieldwork, but was constantly being
postponed. Not that people were particularly enthusiastic about its
impending arrival: it was expensive to get land registered through the
survey, they said (by which I think they meant there was corruption
amongst, survey staff) and there were memories of inadequacies in an
earl ier survey. However, its failure to materialise was taken as
another example of government machinery failing to deliver its promises,
Meanwhile, the forest department stepped in and began to flex its