Kathmandu, Aug 8: A major international conference on Tibetan studies, which the Nepal government recently barred from being held in the country, will now take place online. The board of the International Association for Tibetan Studies, IATS, has announced that its 17th seminar will be held virtually from August 23 to 29, as originally scheduled. The decision came after Kathmandu University’s Himalayan Centre for Asian Studies and Centre for Buddhist Studies, which had been co organising the event from Nepal, withdrew from the conference following the government’s intervention. The organisers warned that cancelling the event would also hurt Tibetan and Himalayan studies, an area in which Nepal has significant academic expertise. Kathmandu University would lose an important opportunity to showcase its academic capacity and build new international networks, they said.