By Joanna Jolly
BBC News, Dharan
Sitting in the quiet surroundings of the Gurkha Army House in the Nepalese town of Dharan, 69-year-old Krishna Rai says he would like to have the chance to settle in Britain.
"I’ve already spent more than three years in the UK and now my only daughter is living there so I would like to go and see her," he says.
Krishna Rai served in the British Gurkhas between 1958 and 1974. Under the new British government ruling, fought for by the actress Joanna Lumley, all Gurkha ex-servicemen who have completed more than four years of service are eligible to settle in the UK.
"I’ve applied twice before but been rejected. But now things have changed, I’m going to apply one more time," he says.
Gurkha town
But if he and many like him go, there are fears the local Nepalese economy will suffer.
Squeezed between the green foothills of the Himalayas and Nepal’s flat southern plains, Dharan is very much a Gurkha town. The British have recruited here since 1953 and about 20% of the population is made up of Gurkha ex-servicemen.
Evidence of their money is everywhere – in the clocktower in the central market place, in the asphalted roads, in the big houses, the many schools and community projects funded by British Gurkha remittance and pension money.
AG Hukpa Chongwang is one of many former Gurkhas who has used money from serving in the British army to help improve life in Dharan.
"In 1987, I retired from the British army. I’ve been in Nepal since then. In 1993, I established a school to provide quality education," he says.
"We are going [to the UK] only for our children’s future. Old Gurkhas want to return to Nepal to finish our lives. We don’t want to die in the UK"
Krishna Rai
Gurkha ex-serviceman, 69
Mr Chongwang fought with the British army in the Falklands war. He was injured during the conflict and he used the money he received in compensation to establish his school, which teaches children from the age of three to 16.
"In the Falklands, I lost my left eye and both of my legs were injured very badly. I was given some money from the South Atlantic fund which I put into this institution," he says.
Last year, the British army paid £60m ($102m) in pensions to Gurkha ex-servicemen in Nepal.
Impact
"There have been reports in the papers here about the impact on the local economy on Gurkhas leaving," says Col Jeremy Ellis, director of the Gurkha Welfare Scheme in Nepal.
"It may well be that Gurkha remittances are going to be balanced by other remittances coming in from the Middle East and elsewhere," he says. "But it’s pointless to deny the fact that Gurkhas leaving will have an impact."
In Dharan’s local government office, administrator Ganesh Khatiwada says he has seen the number of British Gurkhas applying for documents to settle in the UK triple in the last two years.
"If the Gurkhas leave town, there is no question that Dharan is going to suffer hugely," he says.
"It will have an impact on the town’s development, social and economic sector. Without a doubt, the local government is going to face a hard time without the Gurkhas here."
Family needed
Under the new British government ruling, passed in May, 10,000 more former Gurkhas are now eligible to leave Nepal for the UK. But no-one knows exactly how many of those will take up the opportunity.
Although he is applying for a visa now, Krishna Rai says he is too old to settle in Britain for good.
He says many of the older veterans would find life too hard without family support, and most, like him will return after a few years.
"We are going there only for our children’s future," he says. "Old Gurkhas want to return to Nepal to finish our lives. We don’t want to die in the UK."
But who knows how many of the younger veterans will leave Dharan, taking their much needed pensions and community skills with them.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
I apologise for Berlusconi
I’m sorry for our prime minister’s predictable reaction to a story about G8 summit preparations, please keep the spotlight on Italy
As a member of the Italian parliament and former magistrate who ensured that many corrupt politicians and businessmen were brought to justice in the 1990s, I wish to apologise to the editor and staff of the Guardian newspaper for the utterly predictable reaction of prime minister Silvio Berlusconi and our foreign minister, Franco Frattini.
The Guardian does its best to keep the public informed. In Italy this government is not accustomed to free debate, or to hearing the truth being told. While sections of the article dealing with preparations for the G8 summit may be debatable, the rest of it contains little that can be refuted.
However, there is one classification missing from the list in the article, one published by Freedom House, which puts Italy 73rd place for freedom of the press. The real problem in our country is that information is firmly in the grip of one individual, namely our prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi – which must be one of the worst cases of conflict of interest ever recorded in any country in the western world.
Berlusconi’s control over the media is exercised via his ownership of the largest Italian publishing house, Mondadori, as well as via the country’s six television networks: three private Mediaset channels owned by Berlusconi himself and three channels of the public broadcaster RAI which Berlusconi indirectly controls and influences, with very rare exceptions I might add, through managerial staff appointments.
His virtually total control of the media allows him to maintain a dominant position and provides an endless source of revenue that helps to consolidate his position within the institutions via a wide-ranging system of patronage. In the past, these revenues were made possible by the tacit approval of previous governments that refused to address the issue of obvious conflicts of interest. Currently Berlusconi pays the Italian government a mere 1% of turnover in return for the television broadcasting frequencies conceded to him and now used for Mediaset transmissions. Since the centre-right coalition government came to power, a number of major parastatal companies have diverted their advertising expenditure from the RAI public television networks to the private networks belonging to the prime minister.
In addition to the media issue, there is now also another, namely the scourge of the “unconstitutional” government reforms. The first of these was a law known as the Alfano bill, which was ordered by Silvio Berlusconi himself as his first act after coming to power, which prohibits the prosecution of himself and the incumbents in three other senior government posts.
The provisions of this law mean Berlusconi did not have to appear in a trial in which he was facing charges of bribing a witness. David Mills, his lawyer and former husband of Blair government minister Tessa Jowell, has been sentenced to four years and six months imprisonment for accepting a bribe. On 6 October, the constitutional court is due to issue a ruling regarding the constitutionality of the Alfano bill and, should the court rule that it is indeed unconstitutional, then Berlusconi will be obliged to stand trial for allegedly bribing Mills.
I would like to conclude by appealing to the Guardian and the other foreign press not to allow the spotlight to move away from Italy and to continue to perform the same vitally important task that they have always performed in the past, namely the task of informing the public, a role that most of our media have abdicated from because they are no longer being allowed to do their job.