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Walk into any household in Nepal these days and ask about the children. Chances are, at least one of them is ‘in Australia’. Or ‘just got a visa for Canada’. Or ‘is applying’. The aunties will say it with a particular mix of pride and something that doesn’t quite have a name—not grief, not worry, just a hollow kind of acceptance. Of course they left. What was there for them here?

That question—what was there for them here—is one Nepal has been refusing to answer honestly for a very long time.

In 2024, over 1.67m Nepalis left the country. That is not a typo. For a nation of 29m, nearly six percent of the entire population walked out through an airport in a single year. Of them, 856,000 went for work—mostly to the Gulf, mostly doing jobs they are overqualified for, in conditions they should not have to tolerate. Another 119,000 left to study. And 66,835 people obtained permanent residency abroad, meaning they are not coming back. Not really.

We talk about this in terms of remittances. Roughly 23 to 25 percent of our GDP comes from money sent home by people who had to leave to earn it. We call it a lifeline. And it is—but it is the kind of lifeline that keeps you floating without ever pulling you to shore.

The visa is not the point. The degree is barely the point either.

Here is the part that most official reports say plainly but that rarely gets discussed at the policy level with the seriousness it deserves: a significant portion of Nepali students going abroad are not going for the education. They are going for the visa pathway.

In Australia, Nepali students have been enrolling in Certificate IV in Commercial Cookery and Diplomas in Aged Care—not because Nepal suddenly needs an army of internationally trained chefs or aged care workers, but because those courses sit on Australia’s Skilled Occupation List and offer a direct lane to permanent residency. The degree is the ticket. PR is the destination.

This is not a criticism of the students. It is a completely rational decision given what they are working with. A junior doctor in Nepal earns roughly $3,500 a year. The same person in the United Kingdom earns closer to $60,000 as a resident. You do not need a PhD in economics to understand why people leave—or why, when they do, they tend not to come back.

But we should be honest about what this means. Nepal is not just losing people. It is losing them permanently, and often in ways that return very little to the country in terms of knowledge, skills, or innovation. The remittance money is real. The structural loss is also real. We cannot keep treating one as though it cancels out the other.

The healthcare crisis is the canary in the coal mine.

If you want to see where this is all heading, look at the hospitals—particularly outside the valley.

In 2023, the Nepal Medical Council issued 2,582 ‘Good Standing Certificates’—the document doctors need to practice abroad. That number has nearly tripled since 2020, and it is roughly equal to the total number of medical graduates Nepal produces in a year. We are essentially running a treadmill. Train a doctor, lose a doctor. Train another one.

The national physician-to-population ratio is 0.9 per 1,000 people. In Karnali Province, the situation is not a ratio—it is a near-total absence. Sixty-two percent of sanctioned GP posts across the country remain unfilled. Specialists in remote districts are, in many places, simply not there.

This is not a future problem. This is the present reality for millions of Nepalis who live more than a few hours from Kathmandu.

And the reason doctors leave is not complicated. The pay is poor, the working conditions are brutal—over 60 percent of physicians report facing workplace violence—and the sense that things will improve in the near future is, frankly, difficult to sustain. The 2022 ordinance meant to protect health workers exists on paper. On the ground, not so much.

More than a dozen governments in under two decades.

Between 2008 and the 2026 elections, Nepal cycled through government after government. Each one arrived with promises, reshuffled a few cabinet posts, and eventually collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions and coalition mathematics. Infrastructure projects stalled. A single road project—the Nagdhunga–Naubise–Mugling highway—took 35 months just for land acquisition. One hundred and fifty percent longer than planned.

Young people watched this. They watched it very closely. And many of them made a decision: not to wait and see.

This is what makes the March 2026 elections meaningful beyond the usual cycle of political optimism. The Rastriya Swatantra Party did not win because it had the best manifesto—although the ‘100-Point Citizen Contract’ is ambitious—it won because a generation that had been assumed to be checked-out, either literally or emotionally, turned up and voted for something different. That is not nothing.

The new government has laid out targets: an economy worth $100bn within five to seven years, seven percent annual growth, 1.2m domestic jobs. These are not modest ambitions. Whether the institutions beneath them are ready to deliver is a separate and more complicated question.

Other countries have been here. Some of them figured it out.

South Korea in the 1960s and 70s was hemorrhaging its best minds to the United States. The government’s response was not to wring its hands—it was to build the Korea Institute of Science and Technology, insulate it from bureaucratic interference, and offer returning scientists salaries and research autonomy that actually made coming home make sense. It worked.

Singapore looked at its students studying abroad and decided that trying to stop them was the wrong instinct. Instead, it built itself into an education hub—brought branch campuses of world-class universities home, created programs to bring diaspora researchers back with competitive grants, and made staying regionally viable. It worked too.

India took its diaspora—which was massive and which had spent decades in Silicon Valley and American hospitals—and built legal and financial structures to keep them engaged. Overseas Citizen of India status. Investment facilitation centers. Targeted recruitment in the tech sector. Bangalore and Hyderabad are not accidents.

None of these countries stopped migration. They changed what migration meant. They built enough at home that going abroad became an option rather than an escape route.

Nepal has a Brain Gain Center. It is, by most accounts, a database. A registry. A website with good intentions and limited mandate. Turning it into something that actually functions—that connects diaspora specialists to provincial hospitals, that links Nepali engineers abroad to domestic infrastructure projects, that creates a reason for people who left to stay invested—that is the work.

The consultancy industry is not the villain. But it is worth naming.

Walk down Putalisadak or Dillibazaar and count the educational consultancy offices. There are dozens, and they are full. They are full because they are selling something real: a pathway out of a system that has repeatedly failed young people. The language they use—‘guaranteed PR pathway’, ‘low-risk visa course’, ‘work rights from day one’—is targeted, polished, and effective.

And again: this is not a scandal. It is a market response to a demand that the state failed to meet. But it does mean that thousands of young Nepalis are making hundred-thousand-rupee decisions based on Australian immigration matrices rather than any thoughtful consideration of what they want or what Nepal needs. The choice of course is being made by immigration policy in Canberra, not by ambition or curiosity or a sense of what might be useful to build at home.

Australia has already tightened its settings—Nepal was moved to ‘Evidence Level 3’ under its student visa framework in January 2026, the strictest category. Canada has introduced new restrictions. The students will find other countries. Germany. France. The Netherlands. The pipeline will not stop; it will just reroute.

What would actually help?

None of this is unfixable. But fixing it requires being honest about what the problem actually is, which is not that young people want to leave—wanting better is not a character flaw—but that the conditions making departure feel permanent and necessary have not changed.

Pay doctors what their work is worth. Build universities that are run by academics rather than party affiliates. Create a regulatory environment where a small business can be registered without spending six months navigating a bureaucracy designed to extract rather than enable. Fund research in areas where Nepal has genuine comparative advantage—hydropower, climate science, high-altitude agriculture—and fund it consistently, not through donor-driven projects that evaporate when the reporting cycle ends.

And negotiate with the countries receiving our doctors, our nurses, our engineers. The WHO has a code of practice on international health worker recruitment. Nepal should be at that table loudly and specifically, pushing for tax-sharing arrangements that return something to the system that trained the people being hired away.

None of this is quick. None of it is easy. But the alternative—continuing to run a remittance economy that stabilises consumption while gutting institutional capacity—is a strategy for managed decline, not development.

The people who left are not gone. Many of them are still watching. They follow the news. They transfer money home. Some of them would genuinely consider coming back if the conditions were different, if the system felt like it had changed in ways that were real rather than cosmetic.

The March 2026 election was, in some sense, a message from a generation that has not entirely given up. The question now is whether the country they voted for will actually be built.