Kathmandu, May 7 -- The classroom fell quiet when Anil Kumar Jha, principal of Jan Bikash Secondary School in Balkhu, posed a simple question to a group of newly arrived students on Wednesday afternoon.

"What do you need? Tell us, and we will try to arrange it," he asked.

The answer came back quickly, almost in chorus.

"We don't have uniforms, books, notebooks and pens."

Among the voices was 12-year-old Bishwanath Gurung, one of many children displaced after the government used bulldozers to clear informal settlements in Kathmandu and Bhaktapur in recent weeks, leaving hundreds of families without homes.

The evicted families were shifted to temporary holding centres set up by the authorities. Bishwanath's family was among those moved...