I know that I haven’t posted for
a very long time for now. Please accept my sincere apology. There have been
lots of things that going around in my life. I have moved to my home country
Nepal after almost 10 years of stay in Europe in February 2015. Unfortunately, a big earthquake hit Nepal on
25th April 2015 that has severely affected many peoples in Nepal.
Around 10,000 peoples were dead. Many
people lost their relatives and belongings. Everybody suffered by wrath of the mighty Earthquake.
Things started to become normal after
several months and suddenly Mr. Modi, the prime minister of India Modi-fied the
life of Nepalese people who were attempting to enjoy their day to day normal
life and were enthralled by newly formulated constitution. Nepal was slapped by an unofficial blockade
from India limiting supply of essential commodities and fuel in Nepal. Being a
landlocked country, Nepal solely relies on India for its need of fuel. Being a sovereign
country, Nepal has every right to decide what is right for the people of Nepal and
to promulgate constitution that was ratified by over 90 % of constitution assembly
members. India did not like some part of the constitution and started the so
called “unofficial” blockade since beginning of September 2015. The interference of India on internal affair
of Nepal is totally wrong from any possible angle but surprisingly India thinks
that they have every right to bully Nepal. Now, due to the blockade life of a
common Nepalese people is very miserable. There is scarcity of cooking gas, no
fuel (petrol and diesel) to run vehicles. Miles long queue of vehicles are a
normal scene at every nook of the capital, Kathmandu. If someone has 20 liters
of petrol or diesel or 2-3 cylinders of cooking gas, then he/she is part of the minority of people in Kathmandu who happily celebrated the ongoing festive season
of Dashain and Tihar. For everyone else, days are spent counting numbers of
fuel carrying vehicles entering Nepal and queuing at a fuel station on a scorching
heat. Things are so bad in Kathmandu and majority of places in Nepal that if
you like to irritate someone, just say ‘Did I tell you something, you look like
Mr. Modi with that beard’. LOL.
Rambling aside, I was looking for
a map of fuel stations in Kathmandu, and no surprise I could not find one. Not
even in the official website of Nepal Oil Corporation (NOC) , the sole body that
is responsible for import and distribution of fuels within Nepal. I did not even
find a simple table list. Shame NOC. So I decided to create one. For the map,
I used Open Street Map (OSM) data. The fuel station list may be incomplete as
data was gathered from Voluntary GIS (VGIS) approach. For queering the data, Overpass-API
was used. Overpass-API is a query language that is used to grab data of
interest from OSM. For displaying the map, the power of GIST from GITHUB was
used. If you like KML file of the map then click here. I will write a detail post about Overpass-API sometime in future when I will
be tired of scolding Mr. Modi for his wrong deeds. For now its everyone’s
favorite things to do here in Nepal. Even ladies love it more than watching Indian drama serials.
