The district hospital has 15 beds. Due to the lack of beds and specialist services, residents are forced to travel to Dang, Nepalgunj, Kathmandu, and Lucknow for treatment when they fall seriously ill.
What you should know
In every parliamentary election, party leaders and candidates promise voters in the district to blacktop the Rapti Highway, provide a 50-bed district hospital, paved rural roads, and provide one house and one job. Even though candidates have changed in the elections since 2008, their commitments have not changed.
To woo voters, they also give slogans of water, electricity, basic hospitals in municipalities, and modern agricultural businesses. Since 2008, leaders of the RPP, UML, Congress, the then Maoist Center, and CPN-Socialist have won and reached parliament. Some leaders have also become ministers repeatedly. Their agenda of making a 'prosperous' district has not been able to touch the villages and settlements.
The district hospital has 15 beds. Due to the lack of beds and specialist services, the residents here are forced to go to Dang, Nepalgunj, Kathmandu, and Lucknow for treatment. Not only for health services, but also for a pot of drinking water, the residents of remote settlements are forced to walk for one and a half hours. The settlements here still depend on solar power. There is a lack of quality education in government schools.
They have been relying on middlemen to sell the agricultural products they produce. The condition of physical infrastructure is pathetic. The promise of constructing the Khalanga-Kalimati-Ghuiyabari-Chapparagauri-Kohalpur road has not been fulfilled. As a result, the center of our own municipality is either Surkhet or Nepalgunj and Dang. Rato Basnet of Kalimati Rural Municipality-7 said that the elderly here have to go to Kohalpur in Banke to collect their social security allowance. He said that it is difficult to reach the hospital when they get sick because the road is not good. According to him, although electricity lines have been installed in the settlements of the ward, the lights have not been turned on yet.
Rama Oli of Kumakh Rural Municipality-2, who has voted four times so far, said that the candidate has made a commitment to upgrade drinking water, electricity, schools and health institutions, but they have not fulfilled it yet. ‘We have to drink river water,’ she said, ‘We have to walk for two hours to reach the health post.’ She said that even though the poles were dug, there was no electricity connection, so we had to use solar power.’
Kumakh Rural Municipality has constructed a dirt road near the settlement. However, there are no vehicles on the road. She said that they have to walk for half an hour to get to the vehicle. Lildhar Budha of Sharda Municipality-1 said that despite the budget allocation every year on the Rapti Highway, they are suffering during the rainy season due to lack of effective work. He said that the leaders who won the elections did not work for the benefit of the common people. ‘If they had thought about the common people after winning the elections and being ministers many times, they would not have faced the problem now,’ he said.
Despite the slogan of ‘One House, One Job’, Lakshmi Bik of Siddhakumakh Rural Municipality-2 said that despite the slogan of ‘One House, One Job’, they have to go to India to work as laborers without any source of income. She said that they have to go to India due to the lack of employment arrangements in the country and many common people have lost their lives.
Bir Bahadur Wali, a farmer from Bagchaur Municipality-11 and 12 Bafukhola, known as a potato production pocket area, said that although he has been demanding the construction of a ‘cold store’ from the candidate since 2064 BS, his demand has not been heard so far. He informed that due to the lack of a ‘cold store’, he still has to sell potatoes at the price set by the buyer. ‘If there was a cold store, potatoes could have been sold in Basijon as well,’ he said, ‘the price would have been reasonable.’ He said that potatoes worth 120 million rupees are sold from Bafukhola annually.
