LUMBINI – The Save Lumbini Struggle Committee has demanded that half the portion of the income generated from monetary offerings by visitors to the Mayadevi Temple at Lumbini should be provided to the Lumbini Cultural Municipality.
The committee has made it clear that the locals have made an incomparable contribution to the conservation and development of Lumbini area, including providing land for the Lumbini master plan. It complained that the income from the Mayadevi Temple and other places is not invested in local development.
In a 19-point memorandum it recently submitted to the Lumbini Development Trust, the committee has called for amending the LDT statute making provision for picking the office-bearers, including the vice-chair, treasurer and member-secretary, and two members on the LDT Governing Board, from among the locals. It has also demanded that the Mayor of Lumbini Cultural Municipality, and a federal lawmaker and the Province assembly member from Lumbini area should be made the ex-officio member of the Board.
Similarly, the committee has demanded that the face and structure of Mayadevi Temple should not be altered and that the unauthorized structures flouting the Lumbini master plan should be immediately removed. It also called for giving continuity to the regular worship, the evening aarati ritual and lighting of lamps inside the Mayadevi Temple as well as to forthwith make arrangements for free-of-charge for observing the temple.
The committee has called for immediately formulating procedures allowing organization of peaceful religious assemblies, religious talks and tourism promotion programmes, and for the operation of the International Assembly Hall.
It, likewise, called for promptly starting the construction of a school, a well-equipped hospital and garden inside the LDT premises as stated in the master plan. The memorandum, among other things, calls for keeping the Mayadevi Temple open from 5 am to 10 pm and reserving a place for the offspring of Pandit Ganga Prasad Pandey who has been performing worship at the Temple for generations, for giving priority to locals while appointing employees and promoting to permanent positions the employees who have worked for the LDT for long.
More, it has demanded to manage identity card to the farmers whose land was acquired for the implementation of LDT master plan, to provide compensation for the damage to crops caused by wild boars and the blue bull and other wild animals, to immediately operate the electric buses and vans received from grant assistance of the Asian Development Bank targeting the domestic and foreign visitors, to conserve the simal, peepal and bar trees in the area and to maintain an archive of more than 39 statues and valuable archaeological articles found so far in course of the archaeological excavation in Lumbini.
