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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

In today’s world, technology has become an essential part of criminal investigations. What once depended largely on eyewitnesses, confessions, and manual police work has now evolved into a system supported by data, machines, and scientific tools. Modern digital technologies are helping law enforcement agencies solve complex cases more quickly, more efficiently, and often more fairly.

Artificial intelligence (AI), data analysis, digital forensics, and biometric identification have significantly transformed traditional methods of investigation. These tools allow investigators to process large volumes of information in a short time, identify patterns, and draw connections that would otherwise remain hidden. As a result, investigations are not only faster but also more accurate and reliable.

Digital evidence has now become a routine part of criminal cases. Electronic records, mobile phone data, emails, and even blockchain-based systems for tracking evidence are increasingly used in courts. Unlike traditional forms of evidence, digital records often leave a trace that is difficult to erase, making them particularly valuable in proving or disproving claims.

Technologies such as CCTV cameras, drones, and body-worn cameras have also changed the way crimes are detected and investigated. Surveillance systems help monitor public spaces and record events as they unfold.

Facial recognition and location-tracking technologies have further strengthened investigations. In many cases, they have helped law enforcement agencies solve crimes that would have otherwise remained unsolved.

DNA analysis

Another major development has been in the field of genetic science. DNA analysis has advanced far beyond its early forms. DNA evidence can link a suspect to a crime scene or help identify unknown individuals, making it one of the most powerful tools in modern investigations.

However, it is important to remember that even scientific evidence has its limits. Courts have emphasized that DNA reports, while important, are not absolute proof.

In Ram Shahi and Others v Prem Kumari Shahi and Others (NKP 2079, Decision No. 10854), the Supreme Court (SC) held that DNA evidence must be examined in the context of social realities and surrounding circumstances. This highlights a jurisprudential principle: technology should assist justice, not replace judicial reasoning.

Cross-border crimes

Technology is also playing a crucial role in addressing crimes in border areas. Nepal faces challenges such as cross-border trafficking, illegal trade, narcotics smuggling, and the circulation of counterfeit currency.

Crimes like human trafficking, especially involving women and girls, remain a serious concern.

In Chandra Kant Gyanwali v Government of Nepal (NKP 2080, Decision No. 11037), the SC stressed the need for stronger border management, including the use of CCTV and other surveillance technologies at checkpoints and transit points. Effective use of technology can significantly improve monitoring and control in these sensitive areas.

From a constitutional perspective, Nepal has recognized the importance of technology in governance and development. The Constitution encourages the expansion of information technology to meet national needs.

At the same time, it protects fundamental rights such as freedom of expression, communication, and consumer rights in digital spaces. These provisions show that while technology is encouraged, it must operate within the framework of rights and freedoms.

AG’s recommendation

In terms of legal provisions, the Electronic Transactions Act, 2063 plays a key role in dealing with cyber offences. It provides that such offences are prosecuted in the name of the Government of Nepal and allows investigators to seek assistance from technical experts.

The growing complexity of cybercrime, however, has exposed the limitations of existing laws. As cyber offences become more sophisticated, there is an increasing demand for updated and comprehensive cyber legislation, recommending the study of Impact Assessment of Cyber Crime–Related Laws in Nepal (Investigative Study Report, 2081), conducted by Office of Attorney General (AG).

Institutionally, Nepal has taken steps to strengthen cybercrime investigations. The report of the Attorney General further reveals that the Central Cyber Bureau at Police Headquarters handles cyber-related offences across the country, supported by cyber cells in all seven provinces.

The Central Investigation Bureau and the Metropolitan Police Crime Division play important roles in different regions. However, studies have suggested that more specialized training is needed for investigators dealing with high-tech crimes, organized crime, and terrorism, recommends the 2081 AG report.

Criminal adjudication 

The Criminal Procedure Code also reflects the growing role of technology in the justice system. It allows the filing of FIR through electronic means and provides for digital archiving of such reports.

Statements of witnesses and accused persons can be recorded through video conferencing, especially in cases involving illness, old age, or security risks. Courts can also record evidence and conduct proceedings digitally, making the justice system more accessible and efficient.

The Evidence Act, 2031 has provisions that allow the use of digital evidence. Facts expressed through emails, messages, or other digital forms can be considered in court. The Act also recognizes expert opinions in areas such as science and technology, provided that the expert appears before the court as a witness. Documentary evidence is not limited to paper documents, which means that digital records are admissible.

The law requires that proper procedures be followed before accessing personal data. For example, investigators must obtain permission from the court and submit relevant documents, such as FIRs, when seeking access to call detail records (CDRs) or other digital information.

In Advocate Baburam Aryal v Government of Nepal (NKP 2074, Decision No. 9740), the SC emphasized that while CDRs can be useful in investigations, they must be obtained strictly in accordance with the law.

This balance between technology and rights is crucial. Surveillance systems, if not properly regulated, can lead to violations of privacy and civil liberties. Strong legal safeguards and judicial oversight are essential.

Way forward

Technology has undoubtedly transformed criminal investigations in Nepal. It has made the process faster, more efficient, and more scientific. The need of the hour is not just more technology, but better regulation, updated laws, and trained personnel who can use these tools responsibly.

The Fifth Strategic Plan of the SC also endeavors to promote the use of technology and AI across the entire judicial system. The need of the hour is to ensure effective compliance with these strategic plans, and the government must provide adequate budgetary support and necessary manpower. A high-tech, technology-friendly justice system cannot be realized unless the government actively supports and motivates court officials and ensures the proper implementation of these strategic plans.

Technology should serve justice, not dominate it. The ultimate goal must remain the same: to ensure fairness, protect rights, and uphold the rule of law in an increasingly digital world.

When Balendra Shah was sworn in as Nepal’s prime minister on March 27, the image was almost impossibly cinematic. A 36-year-old structural engineer and former rapper, standing where four-time prime ministers and Maoist commanders had stood before him, promising to do things differently. His Rastriya Swatantra Party had just won 182 of 275 parliamentary seats—something Nepal had not seen since 1959. The message from the Nepali public was unmistakable: we are done with the old order.

The RSP has since worked hard to project a single, coherent image—a technocratic, performance-driven government that has broken decisively with Nepal's culture of corruption and cronyism. The 100-point governance reform agenda, the youth-heavy cabinet, the swift sacking of a minister who appointed his own wife to a public board—all of it feeds a narrative of competence and accountability.

But beneath that united front, something more complicated is happening. The RSP is not one political project. It is three—held together, for now, by the shared euphoria of a landslide victory and the mutual convenience of power. And to understand why this matters, it helps to reach for a framework that political scientists have spent the last two decades developing: the study of populism itself.

The meaning of populism

Populism has become one of the most overused and misunderstood words in political commentary. Used loosely, it is little more than an insult—a way of calling a politician reckless or demagogic. But scholars define it more precisely, and their definitions are useful here.

The most influential academic framework, developed by political theorists Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Kaltwasser, describes populism as a ‘thin ideology’—a set of ideas that divides the world into two camps: a pure, virtuous ‘people’ and a corrupt ‘elite’. The populist leader claims to speak for the former against the latter. What makes populism ‘thin’ is that it can attach to almost any substantive political program. A left-wing party can be populist. So can a right-wing one. So can a technocrat. The ideology fills in the details; populism provides the structure.

Beyond this core definition, scholars have identified distinct varieties of populism that operate through different channels and appeal to different publics. Understanding Nepal's new government requires distinguishing between three of them—because Balen Shah, Rabi Lamichhane, and Sudan Gurung each embody one.

Balen Shah: The techno-populist

Political scientist Benjamin Moffitt, in his work on populism's global rise, identifies a variant he calls techno-populism—leaders who claim that the system's problem is not structural injustice but simple incompetence, and who position themselves as the capable outsider who can fix what the corrupt insiders broke. The appeal is neither left nor right. It is managerial. Think of it as: the people deserve better—and I know how to deliver it.

Balen Shah is the closest contemporary embodiment of this type in South Asia. A structural engineer by training, a rapper by creative instinct, he built his political reputation as Kathmandu's mayor by setting measurable targets for waste management and traffic, posting updates directly to 4m Facebook followers, and projecting an image of relentless competence unbendable to any party or patron. His 100-point governance agenda—with performance indicators for every ministry—is essentially techno-populism institutionalised.

His populism is also unusually broad in its geographic and ethnic reach. Unlike most Nepali politicians who build their base within a caste or regional bloc, he launched his national campaign from Janakpur, presenting himself as a ‘son of Madhes’, a symbolically charged move for a Kathmandu-born politician of Hill origin. He won support across communities—urban youth, women, diaspora Nepalis—in a way that consciously resists identity-based outbidding.

The risk embedded in this model is one that scholars have documented repeatedly. Moffitt and others note that techno-populist leaders, confident their mandate represents the direct will of the people, tend to grow impatient with the slow, contentious machinery of democratic institutions. Within weeks of taking office, Balen announced the abolition of party-affiliated trade unions in government bodies and the removal of political student unions from campuses, replacing them with non-partisan councils. Both are defended as anti-corruption reforms. 

Critics counter that dismantling workers’ organisations and depoliticising student life weakens the intermediary structures that democracies depend on—a familiar early warning sign in the literature on democratic backsliding.

Rabi Lamichhane: The performative populist

Lamichhane fits a different and older archetype in the scholarly literature—what Moffitt calls spectacle populism and what Latin American political scientists have analysed as the caudillo variant: the charismatic outsider who channels public fury through theatrical confrontation, making the exposure and punishment of the corrupt elite the central act of his politics.

Lamichhane built his career on precisely this. As a television host, he made a name for himself by cornering officials on camera. He founded the RSP in 2022 as a vehicle for anti-corruption outrage and won 21 seats on his first attempt. His style is combative, moralistic, and deeply personalised—politics as a crusade with him as its protagonist.

The profound irony, of course, is that Lamichhane arrived at power trailing active embezzlement charges, multiple stints in pre-trial custody, and a documented record of using an earlier stint as Home Minister to pursue journalists who criticised him. 

A leaked commission report on last September’s protest violence was conspicuously silent on episodes connected to his controversial prison break and the burning of media offices belonging to a publisher he had previously had arrested. As scholars of populism from Jan-Werner Müller to Nadia Urbinati have long observed, performative populism carries within it an authoritarian temptation: once the leader is the embodiment of the people’s will, scrutiny of the leader becomes, by definition, an attack on the people.

Lamichhane remains RSP chair and controls the party’s organisational machinery. He was widely expected to claim the Home Ministry—giving him oversight of Nepal’s police, intelligence services, and the very investigative institutions that might scrutinise his own legal exposure. In the event, the portfolio went to Sudan Gurung, reportedly over Lamichhane’s resistance. 

Sudan Gurung: The movement populist

Sudan Gurung belongs to a third scholarly category—what researchers of the Global South, from Ernesto Laclau onwards, have analysed as movement populism or mobilisation populism: leaders who emerge not from established parties or media platforms but from the streets, whose authority derives from their claimed role as the authentic voice of an uprising rather than any formal mandate.

Gurung rose to national prominence by distributing water to protesters in September 2025, before becoming a central negotiator in the crisis—reportedly engaging directly with the army leadership in the days leading to Sushila Karki’s appointment as interim prime minister. His biography is one of civic mobilisation: earthquake relief volunteer, pandemic aid organiser, youth NGO founder. His populism speaks in the language of sacrifice and solidarity rather than competence or outrage.

But his conduct since taking the Home Ministry—one of Nepal’s most powerful portfolios—has generated immediate concern. Within hours of taking oath, Gurung personally went to police headquarters and, according to reports, effectively pressured the inspector general to arrest former prime minister KP Sharma Oli that same night. 

The arrests may well be legally justified. But a senior commentator put the problem precisely in an op-ed: “The home minister himself releasing arrest warrants and posting updates on social media suggests political leadership stepping into police work.” This, the piece observed, risks casting doubt on the impartiality of investigations—and fits a pattern the scholar Mudde identifies as ‘democratic illiberalism’: popular legitimacy used to bypass institutional process.

Gurung’s own past contains unresolved ambiguities, newspapers have noted: questions about his proximity to the coordination of the September protests, his role in the violence that followed on the second day, and allegations about the opacity of relief funds managed through his NGO. None of these establishes wrongdoing. What they establish, as one commentator noted drily, are “ambiguities that have neither been publicly resolved nor institutionally interrogated before the conferral of one of the most sensitive offices in the state.”

Three populisms, one roof

These are not abstract typological differences. They translate directly into competing instincts on the most important governance questions Nepal now faces.

Accountability: Balen’s techno-populist agenda promises to investigate political figures going back to 1991. Lamichhane's legal exposure creates a structural incentive for the accountability drive to stop well short of RSP’s own leadership. The battle over the Home Ministry was the first visible expression of this tension—and it was resolved in Balen’s favor, for now, by installing Gurung rather than a Lamichhane loyalist. But Lamichhane retains the party chair and is not going anywhere.

Institutional process versus decisive action: Gurung’s movement-populist instincts—arrest warrants announced on Facebook, sleeping on a ministry sofa for public effect, personally dictating police operations—represent a governing style that deliberately prioritises visible decisiveness over procedural integrity. Balen’s agenda, by contrast, is built on systematic institutional reform. These two impulses, sharing a cabinet, will eventually collide.

The federalism question: The snap elections of March 2026 covered only the federal parliament; provincial assembly elections were deferred. For the Janajati and Madhesi communities whose political voice is most directly exercised at the provincial level, this is not a procedural footnote. It is an early signal about whether the RSP's promised ‘new Nepal’ actually includes the communities that Nepal's 2015 constitution was supposed to empower.

The paradox of the majority

Nepal’s previous governments were undone by coalition fragility. The RSP’s extraordinary majority was supposed to solve that. But here is the paradox: that majority removes the external pressure that might otherwise have forced internal coherence. When you must manage a five-party coalition, you are compelled to articulate shared ground in explicit terms. When you hold 66 percent of parliament yourself, you can defer internal contradictions indefinitely—until they detonate.

Three types of populism can, in theory, complement each other. A government that delivers results, holds corrupt elites accountable, and genuinely includes the previously marginalised would be a formidable and legitimate political force. But that outcome requires more than a seven-point power-sharing agreement and a 100-point to-do list. It requires a shared theory of the state—an agreed answer to who governs, for whom, through what institutions, and constrained by what rules.

That the RSP does not yet have. What the next twelve months reveal about whether Lamichhane’s cases are quietly buried, whether Gurung’s decisiveness respects institutional boundaries, and whether Balen’s reform agenda survives contact with his own party will tell us whether Nepal has produced a genuine rupture—or simply replaced one set of elites with another, newer, and for the moment more popular set.

The author is a PhD candidate at the School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He is also a life member of the Delhi-based International Centre for Peace Studies