Nepal Is it only Dependency?

Thanks to the spread of science and the mass media, Nepal—alas—has lost its old-world charm. It has ceased to be a land of mystery with its gods and goddes­ses, its pagoda-shaped temples and snow­-clad mountains. The story of the conquest of the Everest by Tensing and Hillary has grown stale, and even the romance of Erica Leuchtag With a King in the Clouds excites no more. Nepal, instead, has be­come just another country to be indexed among the twenty-five ‘least developed countries of the world’. Commenting’ on its future, a 1974 UN report opened with this bleak note: ‘Nepal is poor and is daily becoming poorer’. Following this came the grim warnings of the environ­mentalists. ‘The potential dangers for the ecosystem of the Himalayas,’ noted one of them, ‘ … are too great to be put off until scientific proof of their existence can be furnished’.