Now aged 87, Indumati Thapa’s life revolves around a group of similarly widowed women. Her husband, a former Gurkha who fought alongside the British in south east Asia, died in 2020.<\/p>\n
He left her a pension, but Gurkhas who retired before 1997 receive far less than their British Army counterparts. <\/p>\n
Theirs are based on Nepalese living costs, not those of towns like Reading, where thousands of Gurkhas retired to.<\/p>\n
Indumati says her pension is so small she has to rely on the generosity of friends, and roughly \u00a3100 a week in benefits, to cover her rent, bills and food costs.<\/p>\n
The government says it “holds the distinguished service of the Gurkhas in the highest regard and remains firmly committed to supporting the welfare of Gurkha veterans and their families”.<\/p>\n
Many Gurkhas disagree and want their pensions increased. <\/p>\n
Indumati lives in a small two-bedroom flat with her friend Devisara Rana in central Reading. <\/p>\n
Squeezing into her small bedroom I ask her how she feels about her life.<\/p>\n
Her friend and local Labour councillor Pratikshya Gurung translates for her.<\/p>\n
“She thinks they’ve been let down a bit and says she would be grateful if the pension was bigger than it is as that would make her living conditions and financial situation better,” Pratikshya says.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Now aged 87, Indumati Thapa’s life revolves around a group of similarly widowed women. Her husband, a former…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":867611,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[64,63,99,186,184,185],"class_list":["post-867610","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-personal-finance","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-business","tag-finance","tag-personal-finance","tag-personalfinance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/867610","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=867610"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/867610\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/867611"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=867610"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=867610"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=867610"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}