This article provides a critique of authoritative development discourses on the migration of men from Nepal's to India. Drawing from my ethnographic fieldwork at multiple sites, I illustrate how migration is not perceived as a problem by migrants themselves but as an integral practice in people's livelihoods. Many see migration to work in India as an escape from a difficult socioeconomic , cultural and familial situation and an opportunity for young men to experience a distant place, experiment with the pleasures and possibilities of consumption, earn and remit money home to fulfil their obligations as responsible men with the hope for upward socioeconomic mobility of their families. The authoritative discourses is criticized for failing to comprehend the socio-cultural meanings associated with this form of human movement, and for viewing 'migration' and 'migrants' as aberrant. The presence of a disjuncture between the authoritative discourses and the complex ethnographic reality raises important questions about the politics of migration in international development.
Migration to India has been one of the key livelihood strategies amongst marginal households in the middle hills of Nepal. Based on an ethnographic fieldwork in western and far-western hill villages in Nepal, including tracing the experience of young men who take on adult responsibility to travel to find work opportunities in Mumbai and Nainital town in India, this article discusses how the steady flow of marginal migrants from the middle hills is shaped and sustained by gendered and generational considerations. An intriguing aspect of young migrants' life in India is their participation in consumption of modern commodities despite their marginal position and difficult working condition.
Unlike other countries in South Asia, in Nepal research in the health sector has a relatively recent history. Most health research activities in the country are sponsored by international collaborative assemblages of aid agencies and universities. Data from Nepal Health Research Council shows that, officially, 1,212 health research activities have been carried out between 1991 and 2014. These range from addressing immediate health problems at the country level through operational research, to evaluations and programmatic interventions that are aimed at generating evidence, to more systematic research activities that inform global scientific and policy debates. Established in 1991, the Ethical Review Board of the Nepal Health Research Council (NHRC) is the central body that has the formal regulating authority of all the health research activities in country, granted through an act of parliament. Based on research conducted between 2010 and 2013, and a workshop on research ethics that the authors conducted in July 2012 in Nepal as a part of the on-going research, this article highlights the emerging regulatory and ethical fields in this low-income country that has witnessed these increased health research activities. Issues arising reflect this particular political economy of research (what constitutes health research, where resources come from, who defines the research agenda, culture of contract research, costs of review, developing Nepal's research capacity, through to the politics of publication of data/findings) and includes questions to emerging regulatory and ethical frameworks.
This article addresses the question of how human rights practitioners know about harm. In particular, what forms of torture and ill-treatment are made legible through human rights documentation? We argue human rights docu-
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