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The images from 8 Sept 2025, still linger. Teenagers in school uniforms standing at Maitighar Mandala, facing riot police. By nightfall, nineteen people were dead, most of them young. Within two days, Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli was forced to resign. A leaderless GenZ uprising had done what years of conventional opposition politics never could. 

Six months later, the man who surfed that anger all the way to the prime minister’s chair made a move that left many of those same young people wondering what they had actually won. 

Balendra “Balen” Shah, a former mayor, rapper, and now Nepal’s youngest prime minister, moved fast. His Rastriya Swatantra Party had promised a clean break from the old ways. One of the first big items on his government’s agenda was Point 86: all partisan student unions must leave university campuses within 60 days. Party flags, offices, and organized structures would be removed. In their place, neutral “Student Councils” focused on welfare, not politics. Police would step in if needed. Shah’s reasoning was straightforward—campuses had long since stopped being a place of learning.

For parents and teachers who had watched years of chaos, this felt like relief. For others, it felt like a betrayal.

I’ve spent enough time around students at Nepali universities to understand why the reform found support, even among some young people. Tribhuvan University and dozens of others had become a stage for political theatrics. Student union elections regularly descended into lockouts, stone-throwing, and worse. In 2021, an assistant professor at Tribhuvan University was badly beaten by members of one union. Strikes could shut down entire departments for weeks. Even exam results sometimes moved along party lines rather than merit. The old parties—Nepali Congress, CPN-UML, CPN (Maoist Center) —treated their student wings as feeder systems for cadres and local muscle. What should have been a space for ideas and debate had become outposts for patronage and power.

The damage was real and measurable. A generation lost semesters, delayed careers, and absorbed the lesson that loyalty mattered more than competence. 

To pretend this is just a simple house-cleaning exercise is to forget Nepal’s own history. Student politics didn’t start as a problem. For long stretches, it was the only real solution available. 

It began in 1947 under the Rana oligarchy, that hereditary prime-ministerial dynasty that treated the country like a family business for over a century. No parties, no press, no breathing room. A group of students launched the Jayatu Sanskritam movement, asking simply that their schools teach mathematics and science alongside Sanskrit. The regime responded with arrests and exiles. Those modest protests quietly cracked open a political consciousness that had been ordered to stay quiet. 

In 1979, students protested again and police killed demonstrators. The absolute monarchy blinked. King Birendra promised a referendum—something unimaginable without that pressure from below. They didn’t win the vote, but they forced an autocrat to negotiate.

1990 brought the Jana Andolan. Students were the ones marching into police batons while senior leaders stayed safer. Their persistence helped bury the Panchayat system and open the door to multiparty democracy.

And in 2006, during the second People’s Movement, students once more showed up when it counted, helping end a 240-year monarchy and a vicious civil war. Democratic Nepal is built on student blood.

What makes this history sting now is that those young people back then weren’t fighting for student unions as institutions. They marched because no one else would. The unions, messy and imperfect as they became, were the only vehicle available when everything else was shut down.

Here’s where it gets uncomfortable.

Balen Shah is young. His party markets itself as fresh and anti-establishment. Yet the old parties still control well-oiled student wings that could easily be turned against his reforms. There’s a legitimate question whether this ban is purely about cleaning up education or about neutralizing a familiar threat. Controlling the worst behavior makes sense. A total ban feels heavier, especially coming from a leader who positioned himself as the voice of frustrated youth.

The 2025 uprising itself was deliberately different. Leaderless, online-organized, allergic to party flags. Those protesters inherited the spirit of past movements but rejected the old machinery. Now their own leader is dismantling that machinery.

The tension is real. The old partisan model had become rotten — too entangled with patronage, too comfortable with violence, too damaging to education. But removing organized student political voices entirely carries its own risks. Non-partisan councils can manage hostels and welfare issues. They are far less likely to challenge a government when it cuts education budgets, appoints cronies, or makes decisions that hurt young people’s futures. Democratic muscle memory matters. When the only approved form of student engagement is polite administration, something important gets lost.

This isn’t just Nepal’s dilemma. Look across South Asia. Bangladesh’s 2024 protests toppled a government partly in rebellion against a corrupted student wing that had turned predatory. Sri Lanka’s Aragalaya showed what raw youth anger can achieve when institutions fail. In India, campus politics remains messy and often ugly, but it still produces some of the sharpest challenges to authority. The question everywhere is the same: can you kill the poison without killing the spirit?

Shah was right that the old system had to go. Decades of disruption and cynicism had poisoned too much. But a ban is a blunt instrument. What Nepal actually needs is reinvention—independent student bodies that answer to students, not parties, with real space to organise and push back when necessary. Not the old racket. But not silent obedience either.

The young people who stood at Maitighar in September 2025 weren’t doing it as union members. They were doing something older and more fundamental: acting like citizens when it was risky. Nepal’s challenge now is to create institutions that respect that impulse instead of managing it away.

How the country threads this needle will matter beyond its borders. In a region full of young populations that established powers struggle to accommodate, getting this balance right between stability and democratic vitality is harder than it looks. The old model deserved to die. But a democratic voice is not something any country can afford to casually bury, even when doing so brings a temporary sense of relief.

The sun is just coming up in a green village in Parsa. Outside the small cooperative warehouse, farmers have already formed a long line and kept their sack since night. Some are holding old plastic sacks, others folded slips of paper that have been used too many times. No one knows if the fertilizer truck will arrive today. Still, they wait. Some walked for hours from outlying hamlets. By midday the stock’s gone again, leaving most to head home with nothing but frustration and another promise for ‘tomorrow’. It’s the same story over several years, and it hits harder than any drought.

On that same morning, an old bus heads toward Kathmandu. Young people fill the seats, looking out of the windows, quiet. They are going for coaching classes, for English lessons, or to talk to agents about work outside the country. Months later, many of them leave by plane. The fields in the village remain. The hands that worked them do not.

This is how daily life looks in much of rural Nepal. People line up for the basics. Others pack bags and leave, hoping for something better. Watching it is tiring, living through it worse.

Once again, elections are around the corner with politicians arriving in every village with their loud promises. They talk about roads, culverts, footbridges, gates, sometimes even statues in the chowk. These promises are easy to show and easy to photograph. But things that matter in the long run—science labs, agricultural research, better ways of farming—are rarely part of the conversation because these are not easy to show by cutting a ribbon within a month. Research and innovation take time.

Where are the pledges for serious money into R&D? For at least building local innovation centers or research centers at the province or district level, linking universities with actual farmer communities or small industries, bringing in better seeds or techniques that don’t depend on waiting for the next subsidy truck? Politicians talk about development like it’s all about pouring cement, as if a new highway, freebies alone will keep our kids from packing up and leaving.

Fixing potholes and handling local works is the role of ward offices and local governments. An MP’s role is at the national level: shaping laws, framing long-term policies, setting budget priorities, and deciding which sectors need investment for national development. This is where real direction is set, not in day-to-day local problem solving. Election discussions in Nepal rarely move beyond small, visible wins—contracts, local projects, things that photograph well on posters. Meanwhile, the underlying problems stay where they are. Farmers still struggle to get fertilizer, students struggle to get placed even after university degree because research, planning, and supply systems are nowhere in the priorities of any of the political parties.

Young people keep leaving. According to our national data and figures over the past few years, more than 2.5m of our people have gone abroad for work or study, and nearly 900,000 left in just the last year. Student migration has followed the same pattern. Last year alone, over 112,000 students received no-objection certificates to study overseas, almost twice the number before covid. These are not abstract figures. They show a steady loss of people who might otherwise have built their lives here.

Universities play a role in this. Most continue to focus on theory, with limited emphasis on applied research or problem-solving that could create jobs locally. In 2019-20, when countries around the world were under lockdown, universities elsewhere redirected their laboratories and research capacity toward vaccines, treatment, and public health solutions. In Nepal, political attention during that period was on something else—donations, commissions, and short-term gains. It was the time that should have pushed their mentality towards investment in science and research, but even after that public money continued to flow mainly into roads, buildings, and temples, after the end of that deadly time no one again thought about what if this happens again, who are we going to depend upon? Not only that but if the world itself fights the battle who will really be ready to invest their research and innovation into us if that is not for trial and testing?

Science and research don’t give quick photo-ops. A bridge goes up fast and gets a plaque with the politician’s name. A good R&D program might take 8-10 years to show real results—no one gets credit for the slow build. That's why manifestos chase the fast and flashy instead of the patient work that actually builds a future.

It’s time to look around the world. Countries that pour money into research pull ahead. South Korea went from dirt-poor after the war to a tech giant by pushing R&D spending to nearly five percent of GDP. Israel tops the charts at over six percent, turning itself into a startup hub that actually pulls talent back in. China didn’t grow overnight; it has ramped up massively and lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty while building its own research powerhouses from physics to material science and what not. Even now, places like the UK are talking about hitting three percent for R&D, focusing on AI and green tech.

What about Nepal? Our politicians look in a different mood from decades ago. Our government official data show R&D at around 0.3 percent of GDP back in 2010, and recent reports (including from ministers) suggest it's dropped even lower—maybe under 0.1 percent in places. Our research institutes have more administrative expenditures than the research budget. That’s why we are below the global average of about 2.6 percent. We stay stuck importing seeds, tools, medicines, expertise—always buyers, never sellers. Reports from the Ministry of Education science and Technology indicate that the National Academy of Science and Technology (NAST) spends the vast majority of its budget on ‘mandatory obligations’ like salaries and administration (recurrent expenditure), leaving very little for actual research. In FY 2021-22, for instance, the recurrent expenditure rate was 95 percent, while capital expenditure (needed for research infrastructure) lagged significantly. At Nepal Agricultural Research Council (NARC), the operational budget available for actual research projects is a small fraction of the total allocation, with one analysis showing ‘real investment’ in specific research components as low as 3.5 percent of the total budget.

Our best minds go abroad for better labs, better pay, better chances. They don’t come back not because they hate Nepal, but because there’s no place here to use what they’ve learned. We call it brain drain, but it’s really a failure to create the soil where talent can grow.

Imagine election promises that actually say: “We’ll aim for 1–2 percent of GDP in R&D within a decade. We promise to set up regional innovation hubs focused on agriculture, chemistry, AI, biotech, renewables. We'll pass laws to immediately link universities to startups and farms, fund real research (obviously with less administrative budget and more research budget like now) instead of just buildings." Labs could matter as much as roads—better seeds that cut fertilizer needs, new techniques that make farming pay enough to keep families on the land, skilled jobs that make staying home feel like progress. Infrastructure still matters—roads get goods to market. But without the ideas and innovation to go with them, those roads just speed up the exodus.

Nepal’s dependence on imported seeds, medicines, technologies, and expertise did not happen overnight. It is the result of years of political choices that treated self-reliance as optional. What should worry policymakers as a strategic weakness is often handled as a convenient arrangement—import today, postpone reform tomorrow. The problem is that this mindset keeps the country permanently unprepared. Every global disruption exposes how fragile this dependence really is, yet the lesson is rarely taken seriously.

At the same time, our politics still measures development by what can be seen and inaugurated. Roads, buildings, gates, statues—these are easy to explain to voters and easy to photograph. Science does not fit into this style of politics. Laboratories take years to mature. Research outcomes are uncertain. Patents and pilot projects do not offer instant visibility. So they are pushed aside, even though they shape long-term economic strength far more than another stretch of concrete. Migration adds another layer of denial. Political discussions continue to frame it as a success story of remittance inflows rather than as a warning sign that the system is failing its own people. When the exit of skilled youth is normalized, there is little pressure to build research environments that give them reasons to stay. Science funding then becomes a “nice-to-have,” not a necessity.

As new political faces seek public trust in this election, this silence matters. Real change will not come from new slogans or younger candidates repeating the same priorities. The real question is whether anyone is willing to shift the agenda—to treat science and research as matters of economic survival, strategic security, and political responsibility. Without that shift, Nepal may get new leaders, but it will remain stuck with the same future.

We voters share the blame too. We cheer for the quick fixes, the inaugurations, the handouts. Politicians know the game well and they give us what we reward. If we keep settling for short-term bandaids and freebees, we’ll keep getting them.

As a GenZ in science, I think it’s time to ask for more. Demand manifests that don’t only talk about happiness, freebees but talk about science labs, innovations as urgently as they talk about highways. Real progress isn't just concrete—it's breakthroughs, knowledge, people building things here instead of wiring money from thousands of miles away.

In that Parsa village tomorrow, the queue will form again, another young person will pack a bag. Whether that changes depends on what we insist our leaders promise—and what we hold them to after the votes are counted.

Nepal’s future isn’t in more statues. It’s in the ideas we dare to invest in. Let’s start demanding the kind of vision that keeps our kids home, working in labs and fields that actually thrive.

The sun is just coming up in a green village in Parsa. Outside the small cooperative warehouse, farmers have already formed a long line and kept their sack since night. Some are holding old plastic sacks, others folded slips of paper that have been used too many times. No one knows if the fertilizer truck will arrive today. Still, they wait. Some walked for hours from outlying hamlets. By midday the stock’s gone again, leaving most to head home with nothing but frustration and another promise for ‘tomorrow’. It’s the same story over several years, and it hits harder than any drought.

On that same morning, an old bus heads toward Kathmandu. Young people fill the seats, looking out of the windows, quiet. They are going for coaching classes, for English lessons, or to talk to agents about work outside the country. Months later, many of them leave by plane. The fields in the village remain. The hands that worked them do not.

This is how daily life looks in much of rural Nepal. People line up for the basics. Others pack bags and leave, hoping for something better. Watching it is tiring, living through it worse.

Once again, elections are around the corner with politicians arriving in every village with their loud promises. They talk about roads, culverts, footbridges, gates, sometimes even statues in the chowk. These promises are easy to show and easy to photograph. But things that matter in the long run—science labs, agricultural research, better ways of farming—are rarely part of the conversation because these are not easy to show by cutting a ribbon within a month. Research and innovation take time.

Where are the pledges for serious money into R&D? For at least building local innovation centers or research centers at the province or district level, linking universities with actual farmer communities or small industries, bringing in better seeds or techniques that don’t depend on waiting for the next subsidy truck? Politicians talk about development like it’s all about pouring cement, as if a new highway, freebies alone will keep our kids from packing up and leaving.

Fixing potholes and handling local works is the role of ward offices and local governments. An MP’s role is at the national level: shaping laws, framing long-term policies, setting budget priorities, and deciding which sectors need investment for national development. This is where real direction is set, not in day-to-day local problem solving. Election discussions in Nepal rarely move beyond small, visible wins—contracts, local projects, things that photograph well on posters. Meanwhile, the underlying problems stay where they are. Farmers still struggle to get fertilizer, students struggle to get placed even after university degree because research, planning, and supply systems are nowhere in the priorities of any of the political parties.

Young people keep leaving. According to our national data and figures over the past few years, more than 2.5m of our people have gone abroad for work or study, and nearly 900,000 left in just the last year. Student migration has followed the same pattern. Last year alone, over 112,000 students received no-objection certificates to study overseas, almost twice the number before covid. These are not abstract figures. They show a steady loss of people who might otherwise have built their lives here.

Universities play a role in this. Most continue to focus on theory, with limited emphasis on applied research or problem-solving that could create jobs locally. In 2019-20, when countries around the world were under lockdown, universities elsewhere redirected their laboratories and research capacity toward vaccines, treatment, and public health solutions. In Nepal, political attention during that period was on something else—donations, commissions, and short-term gains. It was the time that should have pushed their mentality towards investment in science and research, but even after that public money continued to flow mainly into roads, buildings, and temples, after the end of that deadly time no one again thought about what if this happens again, who are we going to depend upon? Not only that but if the world itself fights the battle who will really be ready to invest their research and innovation into us if that is not for trial and testing?

Science and research don’t give quick photo-ops. A bridge goes up fast and gets a plaque with the politician’s name. A good R&D program might take 8-10 years to show real results—no one gets credit for the slow build. That's why manifestos chase the fast and flashy instead of the patient work that actually builds a future.

It’s time to look around the world. Countries that pour money into research pull ahead. South Korea went from dirt-poor after the war to a tech giant by pushing R&D spending to nearly five percent of GDP. Israel tops the charts at over six percent, turning itself into a startup hub that actually pulls talent back in. China didn’t grow overnight; it has ramped up massively and lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty while building its own research powerhouses from physics to material science and what not. Even now, places like the UK are talking about hitting three percent for R&D, focusing on AI and green tech.

What about Nepal? Our politicians look in a different mood from decades ago. Our government official data show R&D at around 0.3 percent of GDP back in 2010, and recent reports (including from ministers) suggest it's dropped even lower—maybe under 0.1 percent in places. Our research institutes have more administrative expenditures than the research budget. That’s why we are below the global average of about 2.6 percent. We stay stuck importing seeds, tools, medicines, expertise—always buyers, never sellers. Reports from the Ministry of Education science and Technology indicate that the National Academy of Science and Technology (NAST) spends the vast majority of its budget on ‘mandatory obligations’ like salaries and administration (recurrent expenditure), leaving very little for actual research. In FY 2021-22, for instance, the recurrent expenditure rate was 95 percent, while capital expenditure (needed for research infrastructure) lagged significantly. At Nepal Agricultural Research Council (NARC), the operational budget available for actual research projects is a small fraction of the total allocation, with one analysis showing ‘real investment’ in specific research components as low as 3.5 percent of the total budget.

Our best minds go abroad for better labs, better pay, better chances. They don’t come back not because they hate Nepal, but because there’s no place here to use what they’ve learned. We call it brain drain, but it’s really a failure to create the soil where talent can grow.

Imagine election promises that actually say: “We’ll aim for 1–2 percent of GDP in R&D within a decade. We promise to set up regional innovation hubs focused on agriculture, chemistry, AI, biotech, renewables. We'll pass laws to immediately link universities to startups and farms, fund real research (obviously with less administrative budget and more research budget like now) instead of just buildings." Labs could matter as much as roads—better seeds that cut fertilizer needs, new techniques that make farming pay enough to keep families on the land, skilled jobs that make staying home feel like progress. Infrastructure still matters—roads get goods to market. But without the ideas and innovation to go with them, those roads just speed up the exodus.

Nepal’s dependence on imported seeds, medicines, technologies, and expertise did not happen overnight. It is the result of years of political choices that treated self-reliance as optional. What should worry policymakers as a strategic weakness is often handled as a convenient arrangement—import today, postpone reform tomorrow. The problem is that this mindset keeps the country permanently unprepared. Every global disruption exposes how fragile this dependence really is, yet the lesson is rarely taken seriously.

At the same time, our politics still measures development by what can be seen and inaugurated. Roads, buildings, gates, statues—these are easy to explain to voters and easy to photograph. Science does not fit into this style of politics. Laboratories take years to mature. Research outcomes are uncertain. Patents and pilot projects do not offer instant visibility. So they are pushed aside, even though they shape long-term economic strength far more than another stretch of concrete. Migration adds another layer of denial. Political discussions continue to frame it as a success story of remittance inflows rather than as a warning sign that the system is failing its own people. When the exit of skilled youth is normalized, there is little pressure to build research environments that give them reasons to stay. Science funding then becomes a “nice-to-have,” not a necessity.

As new political faces seek public trust in this election, this silence matters. Real change will not come from new slogans or younger candidates repeating the same priorities. The real question is whether anyone is willing to shift the agenda—to treat science and research as matters of economic survival, strategic security, and political responsibility. Without that shift, Nepal may get new leaders, but it will remain stuck with the same future.

We voters share the blame too. We cheer for the quick fixes, the inaugurations, the handouts. Politicians know the game well and they give us what we reward. If we keep settling for short-term bandaids and freebees, we’ll keep getting them.

As a GenZ in science, I think it’s time to ask for more. Demand manifests that don’t only talk about happiness, freebees but talk about science labs, innovations as urgently as they talk about highways. Real progress isn't just concrete—it's breakthroughs, knowledge, people building things here instead of wiring money from thousands of miles away.

In that Parsa village tomorrow, the queue will form again, another young person will pack a bag. Whether that changes depends on what we insist our leaders promise—and what we hold them to after the votes are counted.

Nepal’s future isn’t in more statues. It’s in the ideas we dare to invest in. Let’s start demanding the kind of vision that keeps our kids home, working in labs and fields that actually thrive.