The road leading north from the town of Damak to the three clustered Beldangi refugee camps in southeast Nepal is paved until it reaches the police post marking the camps' entrance. After that, it becomes an uneven surface that eventually tapers off into a maze of dirt pathways. The lack of paved surfaces is only one example of the ephemeral character of infrastructure in the Bhutanese refugee camps, of which there are seven in Nepal. Most buildings are made of bamboo and thatch, and [none] have electricity, despite the misleading presence of power lines just outside the camp boundaries serving local Nepali citizens. Though the camps were not built for permanent residency, they are now in their second decade of existence.
The Beldangi camps in Nepal's Jhapa district house just under 50,000 Bhutanese refugees, most of whom have been in exile since 1992. The camps are remarkably well kept and free of litter, in stark contrast to most trash-filled Nepali communities, and are laid out in an ordered grid. Just outside their boundary, a row of makeshift shops sells booze, which is forbidden in the camps, and car batteries that refugees with a little money can purchase to power low-wattage items in their homes. Given the population density, as many as eight people crowd into 12-foot by 18-foot houses, in between which young children play in the afternoons. Four other camps in Nepal – Sanischare, Goldhap, Timai and Khudunabari – together house roughly the same number as the Beldangi camps, and another estimated 30,000 Bhutanese exiles live in India.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which began providing services to the Bhutanese refugees in Nepal in September 1991, operates with a USD 5.35 million annual budget and partners with four NGOs that operate in the camps. Because the refugees are not legally allowed to work in Nepal, UNHCR and its partners provide essential food and non-food items, shelter, medical care and education. The refugees left Bhutan in the first couple of years of the 1990s in the face of ethnic discrimination and repression, and despite a dozen meetings between Kathmandu and Thimphu to resolve the issue, they remain essentially stateless people. Officially, UNHCR says the camps are not permanent settlements, although in May 2000 the UNHCR chief, Sadako Ogata, said she was not "very optimistic" about the refugees' repatriation.
Although some political dissidents were leaving Bhutan in the late 1980s, substantial numbers of Nepali-speakers did not arrive in Nepal until 1991. By August of that year, an estimated 2500 refugees were residing illegally in Nepal, and by the close of 1991 their numbers had more than doubled to 6000. By August 1992, this flow had become a flood, with 62,000 Bhutanese refugees in Nepal, growing to 80,000 by June 1993, after which time few new refugees arrived. As of November 2002, there were 101,644 refugees registered in the camps, with the increase since 1993 almost totally accounted for by births.