Who Regulates Cable Cars in Nepal? DoED Licensing Explained

Passenger cable cars in Nepal are licensed through the Department of Electricity Development (DoED), a department of the Ministry of Energy, Water Resources and Irrigation best known for licensing hydropower projects. There is no dedicated cable-car or ropeway authority: no single agency writes cableway safety rules, certifies installations, carries out routine independent inspections or leads rescues. Instead, a project collects approvals from a long list of bodies — company, industry, investment, environmental, forest and local-government authorities — before any wires are strung.

Guna Raj Dhakal, chairperson of Ropeway Nepal Pvt Ltd, told The Annapurna Express that an investor wanting to build a passenger ropeway "has to get approval from 21 different government authorities", adding that Nepal does not "even have a dedicated ropeway department or policies". That is the paradox of the sector: many offices can say no to a cable car, but none is squarely responsible for its safety once it carries the public.

The gap has real consequences. When gondolas stall mid-air — as happened on the Chandragiri Cable Car on 30 December 2024 (Poush 2081 BS) — there is no cableway inspectorate to order corrective action and no dedicated rescue unit; the Armed Police Force assists only when requested. This page explains how the system works, why an electricity department ended up in charge, and which European standards fill the legal vacuum.

The arrangement is historical rather than deliberate. Nepal has never enacted a ropeway or cableway act. The Motor Vehicles and Transport Management Act 2049 (1993), the backbone of the transport administration's authority, governs road vehicles and says nothing about aerial passenger ropeways, so the Department of Transport Management has no jurisdiction over them. With no transport-sector law claiming cable cars, the file settled in the energy sector, where licensing machinery for private infrastructure already existed.

That machinery is the DoED, established in 1993 as the Electricity Development Centre under the then Ministry of Water Resources and upgraded to a full department in 2000. Its statutory bread and butter is issuing survey, generation and transmission licences under the Electricity Act 2049 (1992), overwhelmingly to hydropower developers. Because a cable car is a large electromechanical installation driven by electric motors, licensing and technical review of cable car projects came to sit with this electricity administration — the closest thing Nepal had to a competent authority.

The fit remains awkward. DoED's published licence categories cover hydropower, solar, wind, thermal and transmission projects; cableways appear nowhere as a distinct class, and the department has no specialised cableway engineering wing. Operators describe the resulting confusion: Manakamana's chief engineer for operations and maintenance told The Rising Nepal that when a major technical issue arises, the company presents its concerns to the Ministry of Federal Affairs and General Administration — a ministry with no ropeway expertise at all.

Ropeways and electricity have been intertwined in Nepal from the start. In the early 1920s a roughly four-kilometre ropeway hauled stone from the Halchowk quarry to Lainchaur in Kathmandu, powered by the 500 kW Pharping hydropower plant of 1911. Under Prime Minister Chandra Shumsher, a 22-kilometre cargo ropeway linked Dhorsing in Makwanpur with Kathmandu; with United States assistance it was rebuilt in 1964 as the 42-kilometre Hetauda–Kathmandu ropeway, reportedly half as costly to build as the parallel Tribhuvan Highway. Chronically undermanaged, the state-run line closed in 2001.

Passenger service began on 24 November 1998 (Mangsir 2055 BS), when the Manakamana Cable Car opened between Kurintar on the Prithvi Highway and the hilltop Manakamana temple in Gorkha — a 2.8-kilometre line built by Austria's Doppelmayr for around Rs 650 million. It was followed by the Chandragiri Cable Car on Kathmandu Valley's rim in 2016, the Kalinchowk Cable Car in Dolakha in 2018 (Nepal's third), the Annapurna Cable Car above Pokhara (the fourth), and newer lines including one serving Basantapur hill from Butwal, opened in May 2023.

The boom is accelerating. The Rising Nepal counted about ten passenger cable cars in operation in January 2025 and roughly seven more under construction, while dozens of routes have been proposed — from the Investment Board-approved Muktinath project connecting Kaski to Mustang to a mooted high-altitude line towards Gosainkunda. Every one will be licensed, built and operated without a cableway-specific law on the books.

Because no single act governs cableways, a cable car licence in Nepal is really a bundle of clearances assembled across ministries. Corporate-service firms that shepherd projects through the system describe a sequence commonly taking 12 to 24 months before construction can begin, and sector veterans put the number of consenting authorities at around 21. The main stations of the journey are:

Shortcuts exist in practice. Very large projects enter through Investment Board Nepal, which negotiates a single project development agreement, and cabinets have periodically smoothed the path by decree: on 25 August 2025 (Bhadra 2082 BS) the outgoing government of K P Sharma Oli granted "national priority" status to six commercial cable car projects, gazetted on 22 September 2025 — a move lawyers and conservationists criticised for weakening forest and environmental review, according to Mongabay.

Nepal has no national cableway design or inspection code, so the sector's de facto rulebook is European. Cable car engineering is standardised by the European Committee for Standardization (CEN), whose EN series for "cableway installations designed to carry persons" runs from general safety requirements (EN 12929) and wire-rope criteria (EN 12927) to pre-commissioning inspection, maintenance and operational checks (EN 1709). These harmonised standards underpin the European Union's Cableway Installations Regulation (EU) 2016/424.

Nepali installations meet these norms chiefly through their suppliers rather than through domestic law. Manakamana was designed and equipped by Austria's Doppelmayr, the world's leading ropeway manufacturer, and in September 2024 completed a Doppelmayr-led modernisation that replaced the entire main haulage rope along with grips and communication systems. Technical reviews during licensing are likewise reported to lean on CEN/EN norms in the absence of Nepali equivalents.

The weakness of this borrowed framework is enforcement. In Europe, compliance is verified by notified bodies and state inspectorates with power to halt operations; in Nepal, adherence to EN standards is essentially contractual, and no agency independently certifies, year after year, that ageing ropes, brakes, grips and evacuation systems still meet the standard. Engineers also caution that Nepal's seismicity and monsoon-driven slope instability demand adaptations that European norms were not written around.

The absence of a watchdog moved from theory to headline on 30 December 2024, when a hydraulic cable failure halted the Chandragiri Cable Car mid-afternoon, immobilising 22 cabins and stranding more than a thousand visitors — the fourth reported technical issue on Nepali cable cars that year, according to Khabarhub and The Rising Nepal. Sunil Karmacharya, Manakamana's chief engineer for operations and maintenance, responded that "a robust government monitoring body is urgently needed to establish standards and procedures for the operation and safety of cable cars", while Armed Police Force Deputy Inspector General Kumar Neupane confirmed that no agency is tasked with rescuing stranded passengers. Reporting identified specific gaps:

Strikingly, some of the loudest calls for regulation come from the industry itself. Milan Acharya, chairperson of Nepal Cableways Company, has argued that "it has become extremely necessary to establish a separate regulatory and supervisory body", and operators want binding norms for components, staffing and emergency drills. The Armed Police Force has rehearsed cable car rescues at Chandragiri, but only as ad hoc drills rather than a mandated national capability.

The second battleground is environmental. Ropeways were long barred from national parks and other protected areas, and the Ministry of Forests and Environment has been drafting changes to the national parks and wildlife conservation rules to admit them under conditions — stations sited outside the protected core, minimal structures inside, and annual fees scaled by length, from about Rs 1.8 million for lines under one kilometre to Rs 5 million for lines over five kilometres, per a draft reported by Mongabay in March 2024.

Practice has run ahead of the rules. The roughly 2.7-kilometre, Rs 3-billion Pathibhara (Mukkumlung) cable car in Taplejung, approved in 2018 and promoted by the IME Group, saw thousands of trees felled in 2024 and violent clashes with Indigenous Limbu protesters in early 2025; the Supreme Court stayed construction in March 2025 before later letting work resume. Reviews cited by Mongabay found the project's environmental study omitted most tree species on the route and understated its land take in ways that helped it avoid fuller assessment — the kind of error a dedicated cableway regulator might have caught.

Reform proposals circulate on three fronts: a dedicated ropeway or cableway act setting out licensing, design codes and penalties; a specialised regulator, or at minimum a cableway unit with inspection powers; and a designated rescue force with statutory response times. Until Parliament acts, the answer to "who regulates cable cars in Nepal" remains what it has been since Manakamana's gondolas first flew in 1998: an electricity department doing a transport regulator's job, backed by borrowed European standards and a patchwork of general-purpose laws.