Graffiti in Kathmandu reads ‘Let’s protest against the Indian blockade’ in Nepali (Reuters)
The Hindu religion Madhesis ethnic group, living in Nepal’s Tarai region on the border with India, is continuing its blockade of all commercial traffic from India, which started on September 24. The blockade has cut off the only source of imports of petroleum and cooking gas to Nepal, as well as many other goods.
On October 28, China and India signed a memorandum of understanding that China would provide fuel to Nepal to compensate for the blockade, effective ending India’s monopoly over fuel supplies to Nepal.
However, the deal may be collapsing because the committee charged with implementing the deal, the Nepal Oil Corporation (NOC), are apparently so buried in bureaucracy that they cannot make any progress. According to an anonymous bureaucrat:
In the last two months of the crisis, only three meetings of the NOC board, chaired by commerce secretary, were held and they were focused on monitoring and distribution of petroleum products rather than on expediting the business-to-business (B2B) deal with PetroChina.
Details from open news sources are sketchy, but apparently Gopal Bahadur Khadka, managing director of NOC, was holding up the official deal because he was trying to use his privately owned company Birat Petroleum to purchase the fuel from China at twice the market price, and then to resell it to NOC at market price

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