Kathmandu Valley´s booming economy has attracted plains labour by the tens of thousand.
Kathmandu residents do not need reminding that there is an open border between India and Nepal. They see evidence of it every day in the large number of Indian labourers and small-time merchants who are to be found in all corners of the city, seeking their fortune.
As Indians of Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and other outlying states share culture and physical characteristics with Nepal´s own plains dwellers, it is easy to mistake one for the other. However, social scientists and others acknowledge that those plains people providing the skills and services in Kathmandu are overwhelmingly from south of the border.
These Indians, mostly from Bihar, are involved in a variety of occupations: vending fruits and vegetables; serving as master tailors; surviving as ragpickers; working in brick kilns; making wood furniture; and working as contractors and masons at Kathmandu´s ubiquitous construction sites. Thus, while Nepal´s unskilled hill people head south to India to work on menial jobs, Biharis head up to the hills to provide these and other skilled services—so much so that, today, they seem to have become an indispensable feature of Kathmandu life.
Since no records are kept, and an attempt to institute a work permit system has been a non-starter, no one knows the actual number of Indian labourers in Kathmandu. Mrigendra Lal Singh, Head of the Department of Statistics at Tribhuvan University, estimates there are around 200,000 Indians in Kathmandu Valley (out of a 1991 population of 1.1 million), but concedes that no survey has been done.