Focus group sessions

Well today was the first of the two focus workshops. This one was on survey and cadastre. Tomorrow’s (mine) will be on land records. To those of you not in the business I suppose you are wondering what is the difference. No need to go into that now.

The sessions are held in the Everest Hotel, a quite nice hotel on a very busy street. The lobby is grand, with some wonderful Newari carvings above the reception desk, and others on walls and posts around. The room for us is very similar to ones at the Delta, the staff as usual are pleasant and helpful. There were presentations and discussions in the morning, and then about 1:30 we broke for lunch. There were about 15 dishes you chose from buffet style. 2 kinds of dahl, a rice pilau, naan, roti, fish deep fried, lamb in a stew, paneer, papadums, 4 types of salad, and three desserts. The meal will be different tomorrow. I can’t think of anything they did not have today, so I’ll be interested to see what it is. However, for a nice hotel the bathrooms leave a bit to be desired.

The sessions seemed to go well. There was lots of participation from the group, and they had been brought in from across the country. No one seemed to think that it was a good idea to turn off their cell phones for the event, so there was a fair bit of ringing during the morning. One guy has a really nice Buddhist chant for his ring tone. Another person’s ring tone has a bit of music, and then someone yelling Hello, hello. Bizarre.

One of the local consultants told us a disturbing story. The land records here are really in a sorry state, and for any number of reasons they are easy to tamper with. So Mr. A sells a property to Mr. B. a very expensive property – several million US dollars. Only Mr A does not own the property. He takes the money and disappears. Mr. B is left with no money, and no property. It is clear that in order for the transaction to have been finalized someone had tampered with the records. And three low level clerks were implicated. As a result, one of them committed suicide. This happened in June.