The cabinet on Tuesday ordered the immediate implementation, through the home ministry, of the recommendations of every commission so far formed on predatory lending, a decision taken as victims of meter-byaj began moving towards Kathmandu for a fresh round of protest.
The meeting was chaired by Prime Minister Balendra Shah and took five decisions in all, according to Education Minister Sasmit Pokharel. It sat while Home Minister Sudan Gurung was in Nijgadh, holding talks with the marchers before they could reach the valley. The sequence matters: the concession followed the mobilisation rather than preceding it, and the government has committed itself to no new inquiry, only to acting on findings it already possesses.
Meter-byaj, the informal lending practice in which interest is compounded until a modest loan swallows the borrower’s land and, in many recorded cases, their household, is concentrated in the districts of Madhesh and the eastern plains. Victims have walked to Kathmandu before, most visibly in 2023, when sit-ins at Maitighar produced a criminal amendment against usurious lending, a police unit to register complaints and a succession of investigative commissions. Those commissions reported. Little of what they recommended reached the district administrations where the loans, the forged deeds and the seized plots actually sit. The demand of the current march is not for further findings but for the recovery of land and the prosecution of lenders that earlier reports already prescribed.
That is the difficulty the cabinet has now taken on. Implementation of the reports means the home ministry must move against creditors who are, in many of the affected districts, also the local political and commercial establishment. Previous governments made the same undertaking and did not follow through, which is why the protesters are on the road again.
The meeting also approved the first amendment to the seed regulations, sanctioned incentive allowances for the Armed Police Force and staff deployed on disaster duty, agreed cash awards for athletes and coaches who win medals at international competitions, and appointed Maheshwar Bhakta Shrestha as executive chair of Nepal Airlines, with the duties of general manager attached.