Academic literature on the topic 'Plazas – Nepal – Kathmandu'

Dirty, Sacred Rivers explores South Asia's increasingly urgent water crisis, taking readers on a journey through North India, Nepal and Bangladesh, from the Himalaya to the Bay of Bengal. The book shows how rivers, traditionally revered by the people of the Indian subcontinent, have in recent decades deteriorated dramatically due to economic progress and gross mismanagement. Dams and ill-advised embankments strangle the Ganges and its sacred tributaries. Rivers have become sewage channels for a burgeoning population. To tell the story of this enormous river basin, environmental journalist Cher

Trekking to Everest from the Sola Khumbu in Nepal is most definitely one of life’s great treats. When Nepal first opened up to foreigners in 1950 there was only one road from India to Kathmandu via the border town of Raxaul. Early expeditions to Everest had to trek from the plains of India either from Jogbani or Jaynagar in south-eastern Nepal. For the purist, the trail nowadays starts in the Kathmandu Valley, whilst the road head at the village of Jiri is the normal starting point for overlanders. The first week’s walking goes from west to east towards the village of Junbesi, against the grain of the land, crossing three passes and several rivers draining south from the Rolwaling and Khumbu Himalaya. Once across the Dudh Kosi River and up the hill to Lukla, the trail heads north up into the high country. Many trekkers nowadays fly directly into Lukla, where the plane lands at the impressive and frighteningly tilted airstrip built by Edmund Hillary and his Sherpa friends high on the side of the Dudh Kosi. From Lukla, the trail winds through forests of blue pine, fir, silver birch, and the ubiquitous rhododendron. In spring the hills are a mass of red, pink, and white rhododendrons. Meadows are carpeted in wild flowers—gentians, primrose, edelweiss, and the magical Himalayan blue poppy. Small Sherpa villages with their sturdy homes built from slabs of schist and gneiss have expanded with new trekking lodges springing up annually. The terraced rice paddies of the lowlands are soon left behind and apple orchards are a mass of blooms in the spring. Clouds well up and float quietly down into the valleys. The forests with their hanging mosses become eerily quiet. The senses dwell on the serene beauty of the forests and streams, all green and full of life and sound. Suddenly one’s eye is caught by something higher up, way above the clouds. With amazement, one realizes that is no cloud up there: it is a mountain, five miles high, far above the peaceful green of the valley.

The Koshi spoke during the monsoon of 2008. She opened a new path, just as Dinesh Mishra predicted. The river breached an apparently ill-constructed and certainly ill-maintained embankment. A photo taken as the flood began shows the ridge of sand dissolving as water poured through a widening gap in the embankment and flowed southeast. In both Nepal and Bihar, villages and farms that had not seen a flood for the past half century were devastated. The embankments on the Koshi had already breached seven times at various spots downriver. This time the entire river below the Siwalik range in Nepal, where the land flattens, had essentially jumped out of its straitjacket and returned to one of its old channels—one it had flowed down two centuries ago. In Nepal the Koshi River is known as the Saptakoshi, or “seven Koshis,” because seven Himalayan rivers merge to create it. The Tamur flows down from Kanchenjunga in eastern Nepal near its border with Bhutan and India; the Arun comes down from Tibet. Out of the Khumbu comes the Dudh Koshi, the milky blue river that entranced me on the way up to Gokyo. The Dudh Koshi joins the Sun Koshi, which is also fed by the Tama Koshi, which in turn receives water from the Rolwaling Khola and Tsho Rolpa, the threatening glacial lake I visited during the monsoon of 2006. From farther west, toward Kathmandu, come the Likhu and the Indrawati. The latter receives the as yet undiverted waters of the Melamchi Khola. These seven tributaries of the Saptakoshi drain more than a third of the Nepal Himalaya, the wettest and highest of the great range, which includes the Khumbu and Ngozumpa glaciers. The Koshi drains almost thirty thousand square miles. It is Nepal’s largest river and one of the largest tributaries of the Ganga. Less than ten miles above the plains, three of these great rivers come together in a final merging: the Sun Koshi from the west, the Arun from the north, the Tamur from the east.

The governments, business firms, policymakers, advocacy groups, and even the public recently are hotly debating on the issues of environmentally friendly practices. In this context, being a part of 'going green', green banking, which plays an important role in environmental sustainability, has been a buzzword in the global baking industry. This study identifies how the customers perceive the emerging concept of green banking initiatives of banks and also analyzes the factors that influence such practices of the customers. Using a structured questionnaire, the primary data were collected from 403 commercial banks of Kathmandu valley, Nepal. The awareness index was prepared, and the binary logit model was applied for the econometric analysis. This study observed that the customers are positive towards the environmentally friendly practices of banks and ready to adopt the green banking practices. The research implies that in order to promote environmental sustainability, banks and financial institutions should be able to educate the customers about green banking practices and their benefits.