A Historical Analysis of the Squatter Settlements (Sukumbasi) in Nepal and the Role of Smart Settlements

The Sukumbasi question in Nepal must be understood as a historically layered problem of inequality, social displacement, legal ambiguity, and unstable state intervention, rather than a narrow or recent problem of informal settlement. Much of the policy discourse has treated Sukumbasi as an issue related to encroachment, unauthorized occupation, or land administration problem. Such a framing is analytically insufficient. The historical record suggests that the problem emerged through a lengthy process in which landlessness was first embedded within older systems of dependency, then made visible through the abolition of slavery, later managed through settlement and resettlement schemes, and eventually formalized through commissions, legal definitions, and statutory categories. Across successive political regimes, the Nepali state repeatedly acknowledged the problems of landlessness and created mechanisms to address it. Yet these interventions rarely matured into durable solutions. (De Schutter, 2021). The central argument of this historical review is that the Sukumbasi question in Nepal is not best explained by policy absence, but by the proliferation of public agencies without institutional continuity. The state has repeatedly identified the landless, classified them, collected applications for land allocation, and announced redistributive or regularizing measures. However, commissions have been short-lived, legal categories of Sukumbasi have shifted in scope, implementation has been interrupted, and institutional memory has repeatedly been fractured. Consequently, the history of the Sukumbasi issue is less a story of the invisibility of the settlers than one of repeated recognition followed by recurring suspension (De Schutter, 2021).