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Balendra Shah, widely known as Balen, is a successful structural engineer who has emerged as one of Nepal’s youngest political leaders of the modern era. As Mayor of Kathmandu, he reshaped the city’s trajectory by restoring ancient architecture and advancing a vision for a cleaner, greener, and healthier urban environment. His initiatives in education and employment were equally transformative.

Through the Kathmandu Metropolitan City scholarship program, thousands of students continued their studies beyond the Secondary Education Examination (SEE), while job fairs connected citizens to meaningful work opportunities. His anti-corruption drive within KMC further strengthened public trust. These achievements elevated Balen to national prominence. From elderly residents in Jhapa to young children in Dang, Surkhet, and Kalikot, citizens flocked to his campaign rallies, signaling a generational shift in political enthusiasm. His landslide victory in Jhapa against UML leader Khadga Prasad Sharma Oli underscored his growing influence. 

Rabi Lamichhane, Chair of the Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP), has also advanced political reforms. Yet his decision to endorse Balen for Prime Minister reflects a profound act of statesmanship. By prioritizing national progress over personal ambition, Rabi positioned Balen as the face of a new governance model: one defined by efficiency, prosperity, and the principle of “less government, more governance”. Accordingly, Nepal must now bring forward and implement a new economic agenda. In the post-UN LDC graduation era, policies must be efficient, impactful, productivity and export driven. Only through such reforms can Nepal sustain growth, strengthen sovereignty, and meet the aspirations of its citizens

A case of bureaucratic resistance

A young agricultural graduate from Narayanpur of Dang, initiated Kesar (Saffron) cultivation at his house rooftop balcony with an initial investment of about Rs 4m, combining personal equity with loans from relatives and friends. His goal was to engage his son from going abroad, who had graduated in agriculture from a premier Indian institution, in building a model farm. The venture proved highly successful: saffron production thrived, demand was strong, and buyers, primarily hotels, readily procured Kesar. 

Yet despite this success, the young entrepreneur struggled to expand. His repeated appeals to provincial government authorities and banks for subsidized loans were rejected. He sought financing from multiple sources to upgrade production and establish a model saffron farm in Dang, but his efforts were consistently thwarted by bureaucratic resistance. This case illustrates the frustration of talented young citizens committed to advancing productivity, production and innovation, only to be obstructed by a system that poisons innovation and service delivery.

Bureaucracy as the greatest obstacle

The greatest obstacle to the RSP-led government lies in Nepal’s lethargic bureaucracy. For decades, senior officials have enjoyed serving traditional political interests, enjoyed privileges while obstructed reform. A telling example occurred a couple of months ago when the sitting Finance Secretary dismissed the Health Minister’s concerns over health insurance funding; an essential service for vulnerable communities. Such resistance reflects a broader administrative culture designed to frustrate reformist agendas. To succeed, the Balen-led government must dismantle this culture of indifference and transform the bureaucracy into a service-oriented institution. 

Security forces, courts, health workers, administrative staffs and corporate houses, etc. as gatekeepers must be reoriented toward delivering public goods rather than protecting traditional political interests. Only by overcoming these systemic barriers can the aspirations of Nepali citizens be realized, cementing Rabi-Balen as icons of a reformed nation.

The economic paradigm post LDC graduation

Nepal’s upcoming graduation date from UN Least Developed Country (LDC) status in November 2026 marks both a milestone and a challenge. While successive international programs like the Paris Declaration Action of Program (1990), the Brussels Program (2001-2010), the Istanbul Program (2011-2020), and the Doha Program of Action (2022-2031) etc.; promised preferential access and support, these opportunities rarely translated into sustained industrial and export led growth. ITC Geneva suggests Nepal could lose over four percent of export income due to tariff changes post-graduation. 

Traditional sectors such as carpets and garments already face steep disadvantages, with production costs nearly 25 percent higher than competitors like Bangladesh. The current economic model, reliant on remittances and consumption, is unsustainable. Each year, more than half a million young Nepalis leave to work abroad, a stark indicator of systemic failure. To reverse this trend, the RSP government must pivot toward domestic production and export-led growth. Nepal’s fertile river basins and abundant hydroelectricity provide a foundation for industries such as agro-processing, dairy, fertilizer production, data centers, tourism, advancing bio energy like biochar production and manufacturing establishment. Rather than exporting energy cheaply, Nepal should harness it to power local industries and generate high-value goods for exporting regional and global markets.

Building a productivity system

Nepal’s survival after graduating from LDC status will hinge on productivity. Today, policy uncertainty, high tariffs, and inadequate connectivity networks inflate costs and discourage investment and productivity. Freight expenses alone add nearly 20 percent to production costs, eroding competitiveness. A productivity-centered agenda must therefore streamline regulations, strengthen connectivity across mountainous terrain, marginal river basins and ensure reliable electricity for services, processing, and storage. 

Tourism and agriculture—forestry: two pillars of Nepal’s economy require urgent modernization. The tourism sector must prioritize value per worker through digital transformation, diversification of destinations, standardized services, and improved connectivity. Regions such as Kanchenjunga demand trail standardization and initiatives toward establishing a Man and Biosphere (MAB) reserve, capable of attracting higher-value international visitors. Agriculture, likewise, must integrate modern market infrastructure, logistics, and processing to move beyond subsistence farming and basic tour guiding.

This transition requires a sequenced agenda: first, strengthening extension service agencies and regulatory institutions; then enabling firms to adopt new technologies that can compete in regional and global markets. Ultimately, economic sovereignty depends on coordination among the Ministry of Finance, the Central Bank, and sectoral ministries. Traditional fiscal and monetary policies must be reframed, alongside a critical reassessment of three decades of liberal economic policy and the Sixteenth Five-Year Plan. 

Federal ministries, often lethargic in their working style, must undergo reform. Policy frameworks should guide sectoral strategies, programs, and projects, while federal grants must empower subnational governments to foster innovation rather than perpetuate political patronage. If Nepal fails to transition from a remittance-dependent economy to a productive, export-led system, the overwhelming public mandate for change will be squandered. The path forward requires unified commitment to international standards and a resilient productivity agenda. Only then can Nepal sustain growth beyond the safety net of LDC status and achieve the economic sovereignty that has remained elusive for decades. 

Each April, conversations about sexual violence surge across social media and community workshops throughout Nepal. While this increased dialogue is a positive sign, the reality remains that awareness rarely translates into actual convictions within our courts. Police data in Nepal has indicated that multiple rape cases are reported every day, yet justice remains elusive for many victims. This significant gap between public awareness and legal results shows that knowledge alone is not changing behavior. Without a shift in how individuals respond to violence, these annual observations risk becoming nothing more than a hollow performance.

One major hurdle is a mental shortcut that convinces people the world is fair and bad things only happen to bad people. This bias allows family members to blame a survivor’s choices rather than facing the terrifying reality that violence can strike anyone. By finding a reason to fault the victim, observers protect their own sense of safety while ignoring the perpetrator’s criminal actions. This internal defense mechanism effectively silences survivors because they realize that their own community will likely view them with deep suspicion. Families must understand that this instinct to blame the victim is precisely what allows sexual predators to remain hidden and protected.

The bystander effect further ensures that public interventions remain rare because individuals assume that someone else will eventually step in and help. When an entire community watches in silence, the perpetrator receives a mental ‘green light’ to continue their behavior without any fear. People often look at others’ silence to decide whether a situation is urgent, which leads to a dangerous diffusion of responsibility. In many crowded public spaces, this collective hesitation creates an environment where harassment is allowed to happen in plain sight. Breaking this silence requires people to understand that their brains naturally wait for others to lead before they take any action.

Within schools and offices, a pattern of silence persists because individuals wrongly believe that their private concerns are not shared by others. If nobody else speaks up about a suspicious situation, people often conclude that the behavior is acceptable or not worth reporting. This cognitive trap allows grooming and harassment to flourish because the witnesses are too afraid of being the only ones to complain. The state cannot fix a public that refuses to act or report the crimes that people clearly see in their daily lives. True prevention starts when people decide that their personal values are more important than the comfort of a quiet and passive group.

The legal system is only as effective as the people who operate it, and those people often carry subconscious prejudices. Defense strategies frequently try to humanize perpetrators while using harmful social stereotypes to discredit the survivor’s credibility. If a judge or a police officer holds these hidden views, then the most advanced forensic evidence will never be enough. To achieve real justice, the state must integrate psychological training into the professional curriculum for everyone working within the legal system. Awareness must be more than a slogan; it must be a rigorous intellectual effort to dismantle the internal prejudices we carry.

Nepal does not lack awareness programs; it lacks a public that is willing to act on the uncomfortable truths they already know. Real change requires every citizen to admit that their first instinct is often to look away or to blame the victim. By recognizing how our brains trick us into staying silent, we can finally begin to build a much safer environment. A nation’s character is ultimately defined by how it protects its most vulnerable citizens from violence and injustice in their daily lives. Violence survives in the dark corners of silence. Choosing to stay silent is itself a choice.

Nepal’s cities are growing, but not in the way they should. With the Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP) leading a single-majority government, expectations are high. People want visible change. They want it in their streets, their air, and their daily lives. Nowhere is this more urgent than in Kathmandu.

Kathmandu today is a city under pressure. Air pollution has reached alarming levels. In early 2026, most air quality monitoring stations in the valley recorded “red alert” conditions, meaning the air was unhealthy for all residents. In some areas, PM2.5 levels crossed 200 micrograms per cubic metre, far beyond safe limits. On average, pollution levels in Nepal are already over eight times higher than WHO guidelines, and Kathmandu often experiences even worse spikes.  

Recent reports show that PM2.5 levels in the valley have been 7–8 times above WHO safety limits, contributing to a major public health crisis and reducing life expectancy by several years. The causes are not unknown. Vehicle emissions, construction dust, waste burning, and unregulated urban growth are choking the city. Kathmandu has over 1.75m vehicles, nearly 80 percent of them two-wheelers, crowding narrow and poorly planned roads. Traffic congestion has become a daily burden. Commuters spend hours in gridlock. Productivity is lost. Frustration is growing. Public transport remains fragmented and unreliable. Private vehicles continue to dominate. This is not just poor planning. It is a governance failure.

Kathmandu’s problems reflect deeper structural issues. Urban planning has been weak. Enforcement has been inconsistent. Institutions are fragmented. Responsibilities overlap. Coordination is limited. Balen who was Mayor of the Kathmandu Metropolitan city has come to power promising efficiency and reform. Urban governance is where that promise will be tested.

The first priority must be restoring order in the city. Building codes exist, but they are often ignored. Land use plans are prepared, but rarely enforced. Illegal constructions continue. Roads are expanded without proper drainage. Public spaces disappear under pressure. A functioning city needs rules. Those rules must be enforced fairly and consistently.

The second priority is improving daily services. Citizens judge governments by everyday experience. Clean streets matter. Reliable waste collection matters. Time spent in traffic matters. Waste management in Kathmandu remains fragile. Landfill solutions are temporary and contested. A more coordinated system is needed, including segregation, recycling, and private sector participation. Transport reform is equally urgent. Public transport must be modernised. Routes must be rationalised. Digital tracking systems can improve efficiency. Electric mobility offers a long-term solution, but management reform is needed immediately.

The third priority is air pollution. This cannot be treated as a seasonal problem. It is a year-round crisis. Pollution peaks in winter due to atmospheric conditions, but its sources are constant.  The government must act across sectors. Vehicle emissions must be reduced. Construction practices must be regulated. Waste burning must be controlled. Clean energy and electric transport must be scaled up. Urban health depends on clean air. Without it, economic growth loses meaning.

The fourth priority is strengthening local governments. Municipalities have authority, but not always capacity. Many lack trained urban planners, engineers, and environmental specialists. Decisions are often reactive, not strategic. The Balen government must invest in capacity. Cities cannot be managed without expertise. Technical staffing must be strengthened. Data systems must be improved. Planning must be evidence-based.

The fifth priority is inclusive urban development. Kathmandu valley is not one city. It is a city of inequalities. Informal settlements are expanding. Low-income groups struggle to access housing and services. Public spaces are not accessible to all. Urban policy must include everyone. Affordable housing, safe mobility, and inclusive infrastructure must become priorities. Cities must work for women, children, the elderly, and persons with disabilities. Migration adds pressure to this system. Kathmandu valley continues to absorb people from across the country. It may also absorb returnee migrants from abroad. Many bring skills and experience. But without planning, they will join an already strained urban system. Cities must be seen as economic hubs. Planning must connect housing, jobs, and infrastructure.

The sixth priority is coordination. Urban development cuts across ministries and levels of government. Yet coordination remains weak. Projects are delayed. Resources are wasted. The Balen government must fix this. Roles must be clear. Systems must be integrated. Decisions must be coordinated. Without this, even good policies will fail.

Finally, the government must manage expectations. Urban transformation takes time. Roads cannot be rebuilt overnight. Pollution cannot disappear in a season. Systems take time to reform. But direction matters. Early actions must show change. Cleaner streets. Better traffic management. Visible enforcement. Responsive services. These are signals that governance is shifting. The Balen government has political momentum. But momentum fades without delivery. Kathmandu valley is not just a city. It is a test. If the government can improve air quality, reduce congestion, strengthen services, and enforce planning, people will believe that change is possible. If not, the same urban frustration will continue. 

The author is an international development consultant with over 20 years of experience in gender equality, social inclusion, governance, and monitoring and evaluation across Asia and Africa

Nepal has been ‘on the verge of a breakthrough’ for so long that the phrase stopped meaning anything. Every government since the 1990s has promised transformation. Every budget speech has invoked the nation’s rivers, its mountains, its ‘untapped potential’. And then, reliably, the coalition collapses, the reform stalls, and the file goes back to sleep on someone's desk.

So when Finance Minister Swarnim Wagle walked into office and repealed 15 obsolete laws on his very first day, you could be forgiven for wondering if this time was genuinely different. That is a real thing that happened. Not a committee recommendation, not a white paper for further study. Actual laws, scrapped, on day one.

That single act told the private sector something no budget speech could: the government understands that laws written decades ago are not neutral. They are friction. They are the price a businessperson pays just to exist. Getting rid of them is not a reform. It is a confession that the state had been in the way.

The broader commitment paper the government has since released is ambitious to the point of being uncomfortable. Double per capita income to $3,000. Expand GDP from Rs 61trn to Rs 100trn. Do it within five years. On paper, the National Planning Commission already projected Rs 89trn in three years under ordinary conditions. So the stretch is real, but it is not delusional. The gap between Rs 89trn and Rs 100trn is a policy gap, not a physics problem.

What makes this round of ambition feel different is the specific texture of the proposals, not their scale.

Take the ten-year guarantee on tax rates and investment conditions. Foreign investors who have considered Nepal and walked away were not always frightened by the tax rate itself. They were frightened by the uncertainty. A rate that changes with every cabinet shuffle is worse than a high rate, because you cannot price uncertainty into a business model. You can price a high tax. You cannot price a government that might change the rules before your factory is even built. By pledging stability for a decade, the government is essentially selling something it has never successfully sold before: predictability.

Then there is the electricity target. Thirty thousand megawatts in a decade is, frankly, a staggering number. Nepal’s entire installed capacity today is somewhere around 3,000 MW, and actual generation consistently falls short even of that. But the direction matters as much as the number. Nepal sitting on one of the world's richest hydropower reserves while importing electricity from India is one of those economic ironies that stops being funny after a few decades. The ‘Green Battery of South Asia’ framing is not new. What is new is a government that has the parliamentary majority to actually push through the land acquisition, transmission corridor, and cross-border power trade agreements that have historically died in committee.

On education, the proposal to introduce AI and coding into school curricula and aim for 1.5m digital jobs is the right instinct, but it needs honest framing. A country that is currently exporting its most educated people to Gulf construction sites and Malaysian factories cannot shortcut its way to a digital economy in five years. The pipeline is longer than that. What the government can do in five years is stop actively destroying its universities. 

Banning party-affiliated unions and political activity in educational institutions, as the commitment paper proposes, would be a start. Nepali academia has been so thoroughly politicized that even basic administrative decisions, such as faculty appointments and exam schedules, have become bargaining chips in union negotiations. That is not hyperbole. Ask any student who has lost an academic semester to a strike called for reasons entirely unrelated to education.

The FATF situation deserves more public attention than it gets. Nepal is on a greylisting watch. That is not a bureaucratic inconvenience. It means Nepali banks face enhanced scrutiny in international transactions, which in practice means higher costs and slower processing for remittances, trade finance, and investment flows. The country receives remittances equivalent to roughly a quarter of its GDP. Any friction in that channel is a direct tax on working-class households. The government’s commitment to a time-bound anti-money-laundering action plan is not a technocratic footnote. It is, economically, one of the most consequential items in the entire paper.

The diaspora provisions are interesting and slightly unusual. A ‘Return to Motherland’ package designed to bring back first-generation emigrants for retirement or reinvestment acknowledges something most governments prefer not to say out loud: the people who left were not unpatriotic, they were rational. The conditions at home did not justify staying. Creating conditions where return is financially sensible, through double taxation agreements and targeted incentives, is a smarter approach than moral appeals to national loyalty.

The proposed Economic Charter is the most politically ambitious item of all. Getting all major parties to agree that the economic agenda is off-limits to coalition horse-trading is, to put it mildly, a hard ask in a system where economic policy has always been one of the main things that gets traded. But the logic is sound. Investors do not need a particular ideology in government. They need assurance that when the ideology changes, the contracts still hold and the permits still mean what they said they meant.

None of this works without the bureaucracy. The ‘Time Cards’ for public service delivery and the expansion of the Nagarik App into a full digital service platform are the unglamorous end of the reform agenda. They are also the end that citizens actually experience. A farmer in Dang does not care about the GDP target. She cares whether the agricultural credit she applied for three months ago has been processed. Digitizing the state means her answer comes in days, not seasons.

What the commitment paper cannot do is deliver itself. Nepal has had good plans before. The 2015 earthquake reconstruction framework was well-designed. The federal transition roadmap had genuine technical quality. The implementation in both cases was, charitably, uneven. The difference this time is meant to be the two-thirds parliamentary majority, the technocratic leadership, and the ‘Balen-style’ political culture that has developed around actually delivering visible results rather than delivering speeches about results.

Whether that difference is real will be clear within eighteen months. Infrastructure projects either break ground or they do not. Laws either get passed or they stall in committee. Investors either start arriving or they keep flying over Kathmandu on their way to Vietnam.

Nepal has earned its skeptics. It has also earned, barely but genuinely, a second look.

The author is a senior financial sector professional with experience in central banking, enterprise risk management, AML compliance, and regulatory policy