BHAKTAPUR, March 22: We all know that Bhaktapur is one of the oldest Newar cities. According to national census 2011, the total population of Bhaktapur Municipality is 83,658, belonging to Newari community. Nevertheless, the efforts of making Nepal Bhasa popular here has not been successful as expected. 

Under the Women, Children and Social Welfare committee of Bhaktapur Muncipality, while running various training programs related to women and youth, they also added the free training class of Nepal Bhasa. They called 20 trainees from across the district. But, the class could not be run due to lack of the required number of students. Earlier, similar thing had happened when a 3-month-long course could not commence in Ward 7 of Bhaktapur Municipality- Golmadi due to lack of students. 

However, Roshanmai Suwal, the coordinator of Women, Children and Social Welfare committee stated that she would anyway run the training. “We asked for 20 students, with two students from each ward. Bhaktapur has 10 wards,” Suwal told Republica. 

“The main aim of running the classes in Bhakatpur is to preserve our language,” she added. 

Coordinator Suwal believed that the class is set to run from upcoming April while she shared the reason behind the delay in running class was a lack of proper place. “Recently the childcare classes of Bashiska has shifted there. So, there is not enough space to run class," she said.

The training was supposed to start from February 13 while the deadline of registration was February 8 and the interview was on the following day. But, the training couldn’t run due to lack of student. 

However, people are more attracted to other training classes including basic sewing class, advance sewing course, Chinese language and many more, though they have to pay to learnt it. But in the case of the free-cost training Nepal Bhasa, the class couldn’t further due to lack of student. Moreover, they also set to introduced new training session like wood crafting, hair cutting saloon and many more.

The municipality is planning to run class of calligraphy of Newar since it is the city of Newari people and their culture while most of people communicate in Nepal Bhasa. Indeed, they set to teach the Newari script too instead of language which comprises two script- Rajana and Devnagari.