Karuna Ratna Tuladhar

Karuna Ratna Tuladhar (Devanagari: करुणा रत्न तुलाधर) (23 October 1920 – 19 July 2008) was a pioneer of Nepalese public transport. He was proprietor of Nepal Transport Service which he and his brother Lupau Ratna Tuladhar founded in 1959. This was Nepal's first public bus service which linked the capital Kathmandu with the railhead of Amlekhganj, 190 kilometers to the south near the Indian border.

The same year, Nepal Transport Service also started the first local shuttle between Kathmandu and Patan (Lalitpur), one of the three cities in the Kathmandu Valley.

Tuladhar was born at Dhalasikwa in Asan, Kathmandu, the second of three sons of trader Pushpa Sundar Tuladhar and his wife Dhan Maya. Pushpa Sundar owned a business house in Lhasa, Tibet which conducted trade between Nepal, Tibet and India, transporting merchandise over the Himalaya by mule caravan.

After a brief period of schooling under Jagat Lal Master, Karuna Ratna Tuladhar went to Lhasa and joined the family business. He travelled to Tibet for the first time in 1934. The journey at that time involved walking for two days, riding a vintage lorry and then a steam locomotive to the Indian border at Raxaul, followed by taking the Indian railway and a motorcar to Sikkim. From Sikkim, the merchants traveled by mule carvan to Lhasa which took 20 days. This trade route is an offshoot of the ancient Silk Road.

Tuladhar would subsequently make two more trips, spending a total of 17 years in the Tibetan capital. In 1948, in between his second and third tours, he married Hira Shobha Tamrakar. He served as president of the Nepalese Chamber of Commerce, Lhasa in 1952. He returned from Tibet for the last time in 1954 and managed the business from Kathmandu and Kalimpong in West Bengal, India, the start of the caravan route to Lhasa.

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