How the pandemic forced scores of small grocers in Nepal to give up the business

Suman Gaudel of Naradevi, Kathmandu, shut his four-year-old grocery named Suman Cold Store in April after the second wave of Covid-19 started in Nepal. He then returned to his ancestral home in Tanahun just a day before the lockdown (prohibitory order) began in the Kathmandu valley.

Gaudel expresses, “ I was already in debt due to the first wave of the pandemic and resultant lockdown. And, this time, I had to shut my shop forever and return home and do farming due to the fear of increasing debt”