NEPAL AGREES TO REPATRIATE FLEEING TIBETANS: RADIO NEPAL

NEPAL AGREES TO SEND BACK FLEEING TIBETANS: RADIO NEPAL

Kathmandu, 11 April: Nepal has agreed to Chinese request to return Tibet fleeing to India via Nepal, state-owned Radio Nepal reported Monday in its 3 PM Nepali news broadcast.
Nepal agreed to cooperate on security matters along the Tibet border
With China the radio reported.
Two-day Nepal-China talks on security along Nepal-Tibet border concluded at Khasha across the border Sunday.
Home ministry Joint Secretary Jaya Mukunda led the Nepali team at the talks.
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TWO JUDGES SACKED

Kathmandu, 11 April: Judicial council Monday sacked two judges and
warned four others.
Pokhara appellate judge Om Prasad Subedi and Argakanchi district judge
Binod Prasad Shrestha were sacked.
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LABOUR CRUNCH HITS CARPET
INDUSTRY

Kathmandu, 11 April Although some improvement in woollen carpet export this fiscal, manufacturers are being unable to fulfil the demand from the international market due to human resource, The Kathmandu Post reports crunch.

With rising labour migration, domestic producers are facing difficulties in finding adequate number of qualified workers, according carpet manufactures.

Currently, there are around 350 carpet factories operating in the country, according to Nepal Carpet Exporters’ Association (NCEA).

During the carpet industry’s heydays a decade ago, it used to employ around 500,000 workers. The figure, however, has dropped to 30,000 currently. “We need an additional 30,000 workers to meet the current demand,” said Gautam Man Singh Dangol, secretary at NCEA.

According to Kabindra Nath Thakur, the current demand stands at 800,000-900,000 square metre of Nepali hand-knotted woollen carpets per year. “But the annual production is expected to drop to 550,000 square metre this year from last year’s 686,000 square metre due to labour shortage,” he said.

Nepali carpets export rose by 16.4 percent in the first seven months of the current fiscal compared to the same period last year, according to Nepal Rastra Bank (NRB) statistics. Nepal exported carpets worth Rs 2.71 billion over the period against Rs 2.33 billion last year. Carpet export witnessed decline in FY 2009-10 by 29 percent compared to previous two years, according to NRB.

Traders have been exporting carpets mainly to the US, Germany, the UK, Australia, Canada, Belgium and the Netherlands. Of them, Germany consumes around 60 percent of the total exported carpets, said Thakur.

Besides labour shortage, increased load shedding and rising raw materials cost has also hit carpet manufacturers. Carpet manufacturers import wool mainly from New Zealand and Tibet. Dangol said decrease in wool production in New Zealand is one of the major reasons for rising raw material cost. “The cost of yarn has reached to Rs 450 per kg this year from last year’s Rs 200,” he said.
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ISPs HAND IN GLOVE WITH BY-PASS RALL RACKETEERS SAY POLICE

Kathmandu, 11 April: The Nepal Police has claimed that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have overtly been conniving with call by-pass rackets, thereby bleeding the telecom services of billions of rupees and should, therefore, be put on trail and brought to justice, Sundar Khanal reports in Republica.

Deputy Inspector General (DIG) Rajendra Singh Bhandari, chief of Central Investigation Bureau (CIB) which busted several call by-pass rackets in less than a year, cited his investigations to claim that the ISPs have illegally made fast buck, requiring a special probe under money laundering laws.

“ISPs can easily identify call by-pass through Multi Router Traffic Grapher (MRTG),” said Singh. “And, as a token of their responsibility to the state, they should inform the authorities.”

“However, they not only let the racketeers run their con business but have also hampered investigations by refusing to give information,” Singh said.

Nepal Police has turned loud-mouthed against the ISPs while the ISPs on Sunday staged one hour internet shut-down and a sit-in in front of Nepal Telecom Authority protesting the indictment of two ISPs in connection with a recent call by-pass scandal involving three Chinese nationals.

Subisu and Worldlink, the leading ISPs, have been accused of conniving with the Chinese call by-pass racket which turned out to be the largest ever Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) trafficker following a raid by the CIB at its facilities at Chhetrapati two weeks ago.

The Lalitpur Police had earlier put on trial an ISP named Namche Network for their purported alliance with a Bangladeshi call by-pass racket. The ISP´s owner Sirish Karmacharya was, however, released on bail later. Another case involving Mercantile was dismissed by the Kathmandu Attorney Office.

´A lucrative collusion´

While the ISPs have been trying to appear innocent saying they are not aware of what their clients do with the bandwidth they provide, CIB insists that the companies knowingly provide high bandwidth to VOIP racketeers and that it thus is a stark collusion.

According to Singh, the CIB and other units had frequently corresponded to all 41 ISPs in course of several anti-VOIP operations to collect details of their major clients using a minimum of 1 MB bandwidth.

“They rebuffed us,” Singh said. “Had they informed us on time, the rackets would have been busted in no time, thus saving revenue worth billions.”

The ISPs providing internet service to the call by-pass rackets are also found to have charged the latter unnaturally high. “It would not have been possible without collusion,” Singh added.

Subishu, Singh claimed, has still not responded to the CIB´s letter in connection with the documents regarding a financial deal the company exchanged with the Chinese racketeers.

“The ISPs have not been able to furnish explanation over the big amounts they seem to have taken from racketeers,” Singh said.

Investigative officials also point to Nepal Telecom Authority (NTA) for its lackadaisical approach with regard to the ISPs´ unscrupulous acts.

Nepal Police has busted over a score of call by-pass rackets over the last two years and doubled the revenues of telecom services, retrieving at least 40 million telephone calls every month that were being by-passed by the racketeers.

“The four authorized telecom companies reclaimed more than Rs 8 million in the year 2010 alone,” Singh said.
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