Himali Bajura road access
Wards 2 and 3 of Himali Rural Municipality in Bajura district remain without road connections, forcing residents to walk for hours and sometimes days to reach basic services, transport essential goods and take patients to health facilities.
Himali is the largest local government unit in Bajura by area, spanning about 830 square kilometres of difficult terrain in Sudurpashchim Province. Bajura has nine local units, four municipalities and five rural municipalities, and Himali alone covers a large share of the district’s remote northern settlements.
Residents in the two unconnected wards need to walk for around two to three days to reach Dhulachaur, the rural municipality’s administrative centre. Travelling from one village to another can take more than a day, and food and other essential supplies must be carried by people or transported using mules.
Local resident Dhan Bahadur Rokaya said residents in these wards need to walk for around two to three days to reach Dhulachaur. Mangal Bahadur Budha, chair of Ward 3, said residents are completely deprived of communication and road access, and that without roads, people, including patients, have to be carried on someone’s back.
Himali Rural Municipality Chair Govinda Bahadur Malla said no ward in the municipality had road access during his first term. He attributed the slow pace of infrastructure development to limited resources, difficult geography and what he described as neglect by the federal and provincial governments. He said substantial funding for road construction did not come from the federal and provincial governments, and two wards are still without road connections.
The lack of roads has also made it difficult for farmers to transport agricultural produce to markets and has disrupted daily life in remote settlements, despite the expansion of local government services under Nepal’s federal system. For households in the two wards, road access is the difference between reaching a health post in hours and carrying a patient for days.
What happens next depends on funding. Until road construction reaches wards 2 and 3, Himali Bajura road access will remain the district’s starkest reminder that federalism has not yet closed the connectivity gap for its most remote residents.