CHITWAN OCEAN

Photo 1: A couple in Surkhet seeding maize by using bullock driven plough. It is one of the traditional practices followed by smallholder farmers in mid-hills of Nepal (photo credit: Sagar Kafle). This photo was captured during visit to Surkhet in 2016. Photo 2: Farm yard manure heaps on the tilled crop fields in Surkhet. This is a common practice farmers have been adopting since long years back to nurture the soils. However, exposing farm yard manure for longer time reduces the efficacy of manure because of nutrient loss (photo credit: Sagar Kafle). This photo was taken during field visit to Surkhet in 2024 under the Mixed Farming Systems Initiative of CGIAR.  Photo 3: A farmer in rural village in mountain region of Nepal ploughing the crop field by using mini tiller (photo source: Nepal Agricultural Machinery Entrepreneurs Association). This photo was posted in Facebook by NAMEA president.  

Article Review The Real Leadership Lessons of Steve Jobs (Isaacson, 2012)   Preface: Walter Isaacson, an American author, journalist and professor, wrote a biography on Steve Jobs, one of the co-founders of the Apple company, after his death in 2011. Steve Jobs is appreciated for his unchallenging leadership in the business field globally and praised as a game changer  (Steinwart & Ziegler, 2014) . In the biography, Isaacson described 14 leadership practices adopted by Steve Jobs which are considered to be imitated by every leader in any organization. This review is done on the article written by the same author in Harvard Business Review under the topic ‘The Real Leadership Lessons of Steve Jobs’ as a narrative interpretation of the biography. In this review, a brief restating of the facts is done, and a critical analysis is carried out to add up a knowledge brick to leadership development and broadly in organization management. The author mentions four import...

Sliding down hills: some reflections on the thirty years of change in a Himalayan village Background: Alan Macfarlane, a famous anthropologist, first observed one of the gurung villages near Pokhara named ‘Thak’ in 1968 and later in 1986 with more frequent visits in subsequent years. His book ‘Resources and Population: A study of the Gurungs of Central Nepal’ was published in 1976 as a part of his PhD thesis based on his most intensive longitudinal study for a year in a small village. Later on, he wrote the article ‘ Sliding down hills …..’ in European Bulletin for Himalayan Research in 2002 after his striking observations of the changes in the same village. This review is made to critically analyze Macfarlane’s impressions or study results along with some responses made by some outstanding scholars on the same article. Author’s observation in 1968-69: While stayed for more than one year in a single village, the author identified that the village was culturally rich with strong c...

  The increasing access to education in Nepal is an important achievement in Nepal’s development arena. The access of quality education is mostly confined within the elite and rich people whereas poor families might not be able to send their children to the high to mediocre school or they don’t get good quality education even if the families are able to send them to the schools. This disparity among the student youth results in unequal uptake of knowledge from the education institutions. This eventually is creating unequal society having the differential access to education, employment and power. This proves the notion that wealth and education are directly proportional and wealth and risks inversely proportional ( Furlong et al, 2007). With the evolving late modernity, awareness among middle class people has also increased and they are being capable to provide quality education to their children utilizing money from generated from remittance and income from some skilled works. W...

Background The COVID-19 pandemic, which is also known as coronavirus pandemic, is an ongoing global pandemic of coronavirus disease caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome. After its first identification in China in December 2019, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a public Health Emergency of International Concern regarding COVID-19 on 30 January 2020. It was already spread to many countries including Italy, Spain and others before the declaration by WHO.   Later on 11 March 2020, WHO declared the problem as a pandemic. As of 31 May 2021, more than 170   million cases have been confirmed, with more than 3.54   million confirmed deaths which are attributed to COVID-19.   making it one of the deadliest pandemics in history. The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has revealed how the global systems can become vulnerable and lead to unintended consequences in every sector. As reported, many countries had imposed lockdown to re...