Day1 - Welcome from the Minister and Secretary of Land Reform and Management

The Honourable Mahendra Paswan, Minister, and Dr Keshav Kanel, Secretary of Land Reform and Management, spoke on Nepal’s progress towards land reform.The Minister for Land Reform and Management described Nepal’s present political situation as undergoing a “fundamental transformation creating a wider space for the implementation of land reform”. He affirmed government’s commitment to continued engagement with civil society, and described initiatives including the Landless Commission’s collection of data on landlessness and the government’s reduction of the land registration tax for women and socially excluded families.

The Secretary for Land Reform and Management shared Nepal’s successful reform of forest tenure, which had resulted in 15,000 community forest user groups managing more than 12 million hectares of forests and generating more than US$ 10 million from the sales of their products.  He suggested that such successes could point the way for other reform programmes in Nepal and beyond.