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3.1 Population, Environment and Development Activities
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The total number of people living in a particular place at a time is called population.
Environment is the surrounding around us. Environment consists of biotic and abiotic
components which are most essential for the proper growth, development and survival
of people. People need various types of facilities like health, education, transportation,
communication, electricity, etc. to make their life easier, comfortable, faster and improve
the living standard. People get all of them from various development activities. People
develop infrastructures and facilities by utilizing various components in environment.
When people conduct development works in a sustainable way, environment can
be conserved and people can have several benefits in future. Actually, people need
development activities. Development activities require resource in environment
and environment needs people to conserve it. Hence, population, environment and
development activities are inter-related and inter dependent on one another. Various
things are related with population, environment and development activities which are
shown in the following chart.

Environment

Agriculture Health Housing Industry
Population and
Environment Communication development Education Environment

Human Resource Technology Culture Employment

Fig: 1 Environment

The above picture depicts inter-relationship between population, environment and
development. Agriculture, health, security, housing, industry, education, communication,
technology, human resource, culture, employment are inter-related with population,
environment and development activities. They are described below:
Agriculture

Nepal is an agricultural country. Majority of people are involved in agriculture profession.
About two thirds of employment are directly and indirectly linked with agriculture
sector. However, agriculture is not yet modernized and professional. People involved
in agriculture are still adopting traditional methods of farming. They have lack of
modern equipments and technologies, lack of seeds, lack of store house, markets, lack of
awareness generation, untimely and inadequate distribution of chemical fertlizers. Due
to all of them, the food production is less. Whatever food is produced that doesn’t get
market and is destroyed due to lack of store house. Hence, the country has to import large
amount of food from abroad. Similarly, due to lack of awareness on scientific farming,
people randomly and excessively utilize chemical fertilizers on land which leads towards
decrease of soil fertility, food production and increase of land pollution. This ultimately

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