Being an American citizen I have only had to really understand two different political parties- Republicans and Democrats. While both are flawed in their own way, in my view at least, they each represent two sets of values on running a government in a nation full of many different varieties of people. While we also have the Green Party, The Tea Party and others, only the major two political parties are the only groups to hold major positions of power in the United States. In Nepal, however, this is not the case, they have a total of eight major political parties inside the Nepal Parliament. Two of these eight parties are communist and the other five are a mixture of Democratic and Socialist. With a large variety of ideologies and culture, it is no surprise not everything is so easily agreed upon. A major conversation right now in the world of Nepal's politics are the creation of seven different provinces inside of Nepal due to Schedule 4 of Nepal's new constitution. This would split current districts apart while merging others together to form the new seven provinces. Obviously some people of Nepal were not to fond of the idea of changing up districts. One man from Nepal named Nilkantha Neupane from the city of Bhairahawa sat down with me in an interview to explain the situation from a citizens viewpoint. Nilkantha explained that the new seven provinces is really to benefit of the two smallest provinces. In the map below the two provinces are labeled numbers two and five.

These two provinces are also referred to as the "Development Regions". In a way, this almost has a more realistic "Hunger Games" movie plot twist in hidden way. Basically region two and region four are bound to be the richest regions compared to regions one, three, four, six, and seven. Taking up the majority of the coastline, the two Development Regions are provided with access to open water, the largest cities and most financial stability. This is obviously a move to promote growth of a few large modern cities while most leaving the other four regions without much to work with. The technical term used in the United States when districts lines are redrawn for the will of the governing body is called gerrymandering. Very commonplace in America as well usually used to sway the outcome of elections, however in this case they have used it to hog resources to the two smallest provinces. Gerrymandering is the 21st century way of controlling voters, resources, and extending the powers of the government inside a democratic nation. In the United States gerrymandering has allowed senators who hold very high negative ratings to hold office because they group likely voters of their political parties in such a way that most districts are unevenly represented on the opposing side. North Carolina in particular had such a flawed voting process due to gerrymandering that the Federal District Court had to call for immediate redrawing of voting districts because of racist gerrymandering. If you haven't got the idea yet, gerrymandering is bad. It's as bad as cancer, herpes and ring worm- but all at the same time. Leaving smaller or low resource districts financially unstable, which leads to greater poverty, sickness, and general unhappiness. Nepal is just one of many countries suffering from the political power of Gerrymandering including the United States.