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The Nepal Stock Exchange (NEPSE) gained 10.37 points to close at 2,183.62 points on Wednesday. Similarly, the sensitive index plunged by 1.30 points to close at 414. 24 points. A total of 9,532,867 unit shares of 261 companies were traded for Rs 3. 46 billion. Meanwhile, Greenlife Hydropower Limited and Adarsha Laghubitta Bittiya Sansth Limited were the top gainers today, with their price surging by 10. 00 percent. RPP Mutual Fund was the top loser as its price fell by 5.70 percent. At the end of the day, total market capitalization stood at Rs 3. 15 trillion.

Newly appointed ministers of Bagmati Province took oath of office and secrecy on Wednesday. Province Chief Yadav Chanda Sharma administered the oath of office and secrecy to eight ministers. Ganga Narayan Shrestha has been appointed as the Minister for Internal Affairs and Law Minister, Kumari Moktan as the Minister for Social Development and Yuvaraj Dulal as the Minister for Physical Infrastructure. They were appointed as ministers from the CPN (Maoist Center). Similarly, from the CPN-UML, Keshav Prasad Pokharel has been appointed as the Minister for Agriculture and Livestock Development, Rameshwor Shrestha as the Health Minister and Ek Lal Shrestha as the Minister for Employment and Transport. Likewise, Uddhav Thapa, who was appointed as the minister from the Rastriya Prajatantra Party earlier, has been given the responsibility of the Ministry of Drinking Water, Energy and Irrigation. Dambar Tamang and Raju Bista of the Rastriya Prajatantra Party have been appointed as the Minister for Tourism and Cooperatives and Minister for Forest and Environment respectively. They will assume office today itself. With this, an 11-member Cabinet has been formed in Bagmati Province.

There has been a significant increase in non-performing loans (NPL) of commercial banks in the first half of the current fiscal year. The financial reports of 21 commercial banks for the second quarter show bad loans of the banks increasing by 116 percent. The average NPL of commercial banks has increased to 2.29 percent in the first half of FY 2022/23 compared to 1.06 percent during the same period of FY 2021/22. Bankers say NPLs have risen mainly due to the non-recovery of debts. As the private sector struggled with rising borrowing rates and a sharp slowdown in market demand, banks have been struggling to recover the loans. The non-payment of loan installment and interest has increased in this fiscal year, according to bankers. Had there been economic activity, it would have been easier for borrowers to pay the debt and interest on time, they say. The Nepal Rastra Bank implemented the guidelines on working capital loans in mid-October 2022 in order to stop the misuse of credit and control the trend of paying the banks' interest by taking loans. Businessmen and industrialists who used to take loans from banks to pay interest were unable to pay interest after the implementation of working capital loan guidelines which also contributed to the rise in the NPL of banks. The profits of banks have also been affected by the increment in bad loans as they have to keep aside large amounts of money for the provisioning of bad loans. Provisioning is a practice where banks are required to maintain a certain amount in reserve when loans are not recovered. Of the 21 commercial banks that have published their second quarter report, the Agriculture Development Bank Limited (ADBL) has the highest NPL. The bank's NPL has increased to 4.52 percent by mid-January compared to 2.08 percent during the same period of the last fiscal. The profit of the ADBL has decreased by a whopping 109.06 percent in the first half of the current fiscal. The bank has incurred a loss of 0.128 billion in the first half of FY 2022/23 compared to a profit of 1.42 billion during the same period of FY 2021/22. Himalayan Bank Limited (HBL), Sunrise Bank, Kumari Bank, and Nepal Bank are the other four banks whose NPL is above 3 percent. The HBL's NPL has reached 3.77 percent in the first half of FY 2022/23 compared to 0.72 percent during the same period of FY 2021/22. Sunrise Bank's NPL increased to 3.36 percent in mid-January 2023 from 1.40 percent in mid-January 2022. The NPL of Kumari Bank and Nepal Bank has increased to 3.15 percent and 3.11 percent, respectively. The NPL of Kumari Bank increased mainly due to the merger with NCC Bank. As the NCC Bank had a higher NPL, Kumari Bank's overall bad loan increased after the merger. Rastriya Banijya Bank (RBB) is the only commercial bank that has its NPL decreased in this fiscal year. The government-owned bank has been able to reduce its bad loans by 9.67 percent during the review period. The RBB's NPL has decreased to 2.79 percent in mid-January 2023 from 3.06 percent in mid-January 2022.     NPLs of Commercial Banks

The Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Bishnu Poudel on Monday instructed the government secretaries to increase capital expenditure and reduce current expenditure of their respective ministries. Since he took the charge of the Finance Ministry in December 2022, Poudel has zeroed in on two fronts of improving revenue collection and expedite capital expenditure and controlling recurrent expenditure. During a discussion program on budget implementation at the Ministry of Finance on Monday, Poudel highlighted the need to maintain fiscal discipline. His message to the secretaries was loud and clear. He said, "The situation of capital expenditure and revenue mobilization is worrying, and secretaries have to be strict in revenue management and give special priority to capital expenditure." Such is the state of poor government spending that seven ministries have spent less than 10 percent of their capital expenditure in the first half of the current fiscal year. Of them, the capital expenditure of four ministries is below five percent. As per the target, ministries should have spent 30 percent of their capital expenditure in the first six months of the fiscal year. The Finance Ministry's data shows none of the ministries have been able to spend capital expenditure as per the target. The capital expenditure of the ministries having large development budgets has also been dismal in this fiscal. The Ministry of Physical Infrastructure and Transport, the Ministry of Urban Development, the Ministry of Drinking Water, and the Ministry of Energy, Water Resources and Irrigation have not been able to utilize their capital expenditure of even 50 percent of the allocation. According to the Financial Comptroller General Office (FCGO), the government has spent just Rs 53.45 billion, which accounts for just 14 percent of the allocated capital budget since the start of the current fiscal year. This rate of development spending is similar to FY 2021/22 when the capital expenditure stood at 13.44 percent in the first half of the fiscal year. Finance Ministry officials say the poor revenue collection in the first half of the fiscal year has posed a new challenge, that of fiscal imbalance. Unlike in past years, the government's overall revenue collection has decreased significantly in this fiscal compared to the last fiscal year. The revenue administration has been struggling to meet the revenue target from the start of the current fiscal. As resource management becomes challenging, Poudel on Monday directed the secretaries not to ask for additional budget for any heading other than mandatory obligations. Citing the poor revenue collection in this fiscal, secretaries have been told to spend the funds only on the respective headings for which the budget has been allocated. Finance Ministry officials say maintaining fiscal discipline has become of paramount importance for now. Introducing cost-cutting measures, the ministry itself has implemented 17-point guidelines to reduce expenses. "We expect other ministries to follow us in this respect," said a senior official at the ministry.

While the decline in the country's imports in the past year has been a much talked about issue, not much attention has been caught by the fall in the country's exports. Nepal's exports have declined by 32 percent to Rs 80.80 billion in the first half of the current fiscal year, particularly due to the dramatic decline in the exports of palm oil, soyabean oil, and sunflower oil to India. In the last 2-3 years, Nepal’s export figure has largely been dominated by two products—palm oil and soyabean oil, which are basically not produced in Nepal. The edible oils are brought in crude form and refined in Nepal-based refineries and exported to India. Industry insiders say many producers do not even refine the oils as they import refined oils, repackage and label the products and export them to India which results in no to little value addition. Aided by the ballooning export of edible oils, Nepal’s overall exports touched the Rs 200 billion mark for the first time in history in FY 2021/22. The contribution of edible oils to the country's overall export was Rs 93.69 billion. Nepal export palm oil and soyabean oil worth Rs 89.18 billion in the last fiscal year which accounts for around 45 percent of Nepal’s total exports. However, the exports of edible oils have slumped massively in the first half of FY 2022/23. The exports of palm oil slumped to Rs 13.08 billion from Rs 31.97 billion, according to data from the Department of Customs and the Trade and Export Promotion Center (TEPC). Likewise, exports of soyabean oil also dipped to Rs 8 billion in the first six months of this fiscal from Rs 34.26 billion in the same period last fiscal year. Official data shows that there has not been a significant drop in other products which are exported on a large scale. The country’s exports of these products suffered after India lowered its customs tariff to help tame the rising inflation rate in October 2021. In fact, the import duty on crude varieties of palm oil, soybean oil, and sunflower oil is currently zero. However, after taking into account the 5 percent agri cess and 10 percent social welfare cess, the effective duty on crude forms of these three types of edible oil is at 5.5 percent. At the start of 2021, effective customs duty on palm, soybean and sunflower oils reached as high as 35.75 percent. With the Indian government removing the import duty on these edible oils, the duty differential advantage Nepali exporters had was gone. Nepal currently levies a one percent customs duty and a 13 percent VAT on the import of these three types of edible oil, according to Bipin Kabra, owner of Quality Refinery, one of the leading exporters of vegetable and palm oil to India. "The Indian government’s decision to abolish customs duty on raw soybean oil and palm oil has badly affected our exports,” he said. According to Kabra, his firm currently exports these oil products only one-fifth of what it used to export until India abolished the import duty. “In order to restore the exports, either India should hike the import duty again or the Nepal government should give us export subsidies,” he said. India will not be hiking duty on the import of these products anytime soon. In late December last year, the Indian government extended the policy of keeping lower tariffs on vegetable oil till March 2024. These products also don’t qualify to get the export subsidies that the government announced through the budget for the current fiscal year. Nepal government in the federal budget for the current fiscal year 2022/23 had announced that it would provide export subsidies to 18 types of goods. Government officials and experts say that vegetable oil and palm oil have very low-value additions in the country. But Kabra claimed that there is a value of the addition of as much as 25 percent. “There is a value addition during the refining and packaging process,” he said, adding, “This has also aided the growth of the packaging industry in Nepal.” The problem faced by the domestic edible oil producers currently is similar to the late 1990s when Nepal’s vegetable ghee industry suffered massively after India lowered the import duty of raw materials of vegetable ghee. India also imposed quantitative restrictions on the exports of Nepal’s vegetable ghee. Even the World Bank has not considered the export of palm oil and soyabean oil as sustainable export products. In its Nepal Development Update in December 2019, the Washington DC-based multilateral agency stated that Nepal capitalized on this arbitrage opportunity and significantly increased exports of palm oil and soybean oil and suggested that the edible oil business taking advantage of trade preferences needed to be more sustainable. The South Asian Free Trade Area agreement, to which Nepal is a party, stipulates that goods of preferential origin are eligible to be imported and re-exported with lower duty rates or at zero rates if the requirements are met. Under this agreement, imports must contribute a value of at least 30 percent in order for Nepali exports to India to qualify for tariff concessions. Experts in Nepali trade have said that Nepali traders fall short of the required 30 percent value addition. It is not the first time that Indian policy has determined whether these two items will be exported or not.   Overall Exports

The price of gold has dropped by Rs 100 per tola in the domestic market on Wednesday. According to the Federation of Nepal Gold and Silver Dealers’ Association, the yellow bullion is being traded at Rs 106, 200 per tola today. The yellow metal was traded at Rs 106, 300 per tola on Tuesday. Meanwhile, the tejabi gold is being traded at Rs 105, 700 per tola. Similarly, the price of silver has remained unchanged and is being traded at Rs 1, 365 per tola today.

A man who attempted self-immolation near the Parliament building in New Baneshwor on Tuesday succumbed to his injuries on Wednesday morning. Prem Prasad Acharya (36) of Ilam set himself on fire and attempted suicide yesterday. He was rescued immediately and rushed to the Burn Hospital in Kirtipur but breathed his last during the course of treatment, police said.  

I’m a 19-year-old student, and I have a very short attention span. I zone out mid conversation and forget what was being said after a while. Sometimes I’m doing alright, sometimes I’m hyperactive, and sometimes I just don’t feel like doing anything. I have extreme mood swings. I try focusing on a certain task but then I get distracted easily. Is this just laziness or is it a symptom of ADHD? What should I do?—L.I. Answered by Aditya Dangol, counseling psychologist, Happy Minds First, I want to start by appreciating your self-awareness, which is a major step for further improving your mental state. The frustration is palpable and it indicates that you might be quite overwhelmed and confused, which is completely valid. One thing I can let you know for sure is that the symptoms you have mentioned are definitely not of laziness, but it might be associated with ADHD or anxiety. There are a few things you can try on your own to reduce those symptoms. With issues like mood swings, lack of concentration, and forgetfulness, it’s usually helpful if you make a schedule. That will structure your day and make you feel less anxious. You can set reminders for yourself in order to remember what you need to do. Include things that you love doing to avoid monotony. It doesn’t always have to be productive tasks, but things like watching a movie or going out for coffee could be on the list too. Reward yourself when you complete your daily tasks. It will motivate you to remain consistent with your routine. Having a support system is very important in this situation. Surround yourself with people who love and care about you and don’t shy away from sharing how you feel. Getting your feelings validated can be a calming experience. If you are an introvert, it might be difficult for you to open up. In that case, take baby steps. Start by sharing something small and see how that goes. You will eventually find someone you are comfortable enough to talk to, but you need to start somewhere.  If you know anyone who is going through the same issues, try asking him/her what he/she does in order to lessen those symptoms. Although the same thing might not work for you, it’s worth a try. Exercise is also beneficial in improving your mental health. But only minimizing the symptoms isn’t enough. It’s necessary for you to get a proper diagnosis in order to find out what is causing the problems in the first place. For that, you will have to visit a mental health professional. There are a few tests that you will need to go through since your symptoms can be related with ADHD, anxiety, or can simply be caused by stress. I would not suggest self-diagnosis because you might not always come to the right conclusion. There are a lot of factors like family history and physical health that need to be analyzed. Before visiting a psychologist, jot down your symptoms in a journal. This will help your therapist to understand what exactly you are going through, advise necessary tests, and come to a proper conclusion. Even if you get diagnosed with ADHD, don’t worry. It’s manageable. Follow the suggestions your therapist provides you, and you will be just fine.