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This year, unlike in the past, the Government of Nepal’s prudence was evident when the Department of Hydrology and Meteorology (DHM) issued heavy rainfall warnings. The National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority (NDRRMA) issued a four-day travel advisory for October 3–6, which prohibited long-distance vehicle operations and limited travel in susceptible areas. Citizens were urged to refrain from avoidable travel with early warnings of landslides and swelling rivers in the provinces of Koshi, Bagmati, Gandaki and Lumbini. Even public holidays were issued for two days, prompting the residents to stay safely at home.

With swift evacuations and well-coordinated communication, these preventative measures helped prevent significant losses during the monsoon. A slight improvement in Nepal’s disaster management was visible this year, evident with better early warning systems, institutional coordination and a maturing public response mechanism. Yet, early preparedness and rapid post-disaster recovery can no longer remain the only answer: infrastructures built for a gentler historical climate remain worryingly defenseless to the “new normal” of intensifying future extremes.

The flood that rewrote the map

The September 2024 floods were a sobering lesson. A rare cyclonic circulation and mid-tropospheric westerly trough triggered 60 hours of continuous rainfall across central and eastern Nepal. According to the Department of Hydrology and Meteorology, over 183 weather stations recorded more than 50 mm, while 25 broke 24-hour records, some exceeding 400 mm. The streams of the Bagmati, Koshi, and Narayani basins surpassed their historic highs, causing landslides, debris flows, and flash floods that affected 2.6m people, claimed 249 lives, and caused economic losses exceeding Rs 46bn, over one percent of GDP.

Among the worst hit was the Banepa–Bardibas (BP) Highway, a lifeline connecting Kathmandu with the eastern Tarai. Field assessments along the Roshi Khola corridor, from Bhakunde Besi to the Sunkoshi confluence, revealed widespread destruction, with dozens of landslides and slope failures damaging approximately 80 km of the highway, and 26 km were severely impacted. Collapsed retaining walls and eroded embankments were anything but sparse. In one particularly devastated stretch of the Kavrepalanchok district, the river eroded an 8-km segment of the roadway, rendering it impassable.

Our study found that the Roshi basin received an average of 267 mm of rainfall in 24 hours, equivalent to a once-in-773-year event, based on 60 years of rainfall records. The unprecedented precipitation turned the river into a force that the infrastructure was never built to face, with a discharge significantly higher than the design capacity.

A year later, the same story

The susceptibility was exposed again this year. Temporary repairs failed, embankments slumped and diversions were washed out. The BP Highway’s recurring damage reveals a systemic flaw: Nepal’s highways, particularly along river corridors, are no longer safe, acutely exposed to the whims of climate extremities.

Lessons from collapse

First, our engineering standards must evolve. The flood magnitudes adopted by the NRS 2070 assume a 50-year return period for first-class roads and a 100-year for bridges. While a 10 percent increase in design discharge is mandated to account for climate change, DOR’s Guidelines on Hydrologic and Hydraulic Analysis and River Training Works for Bridge Design no longer suffices in the face of rapidly shortening return periods.

There should be no delay in increasing the design return period to 100 and 200 years for major roads and bridges, respectively. Moving beyond reliance on historical data-based frequency analysis, all major road retrofitting, bridge reconstruction and new construction projects must be checked against the contemporary climate projections for the design period.

Second, planning must be risk-informed and data-driven. Integrating climate-informed vulnerability mapping to identify at-risk zones before the construction or repair is imperative. This helps to avoid the high-risk zones from the get-go and minimizes the likelihood of recurring future damage.

In flood-prone river corridors, vulnerability mapping determines where infrastructure elevation is necessary versus where an early warning system might suffice (reducing consequence through evacuation and traffic management). This systematic approach should be an indispensable first step before deploying costly engineering solutions.

And most importantly, resilience cannot rely on concrete alone. Structural adaptations like increased freeboard of bridges and strategic elevation of roadways should be complemented with nature-based and hybrid solutions, vegetative slope stabilization and bioengineering. In Nepal, steep slopes could benefit particularly from hybrid approaches such as vegetative bioengineering combined with check dams. Also, land-use planning, like establishing conservation buffer zones adjacent to floodplains to regulate development, prevents encroachments that heighten flood levels or exacerbate erosion.

Reaction to resilience

To break free from the disaster and repair loop, Nepal must embed “climate logic” into its development DNA. “Fund Resilience, Not Disasters,” the theme from the recent International Day for Disaster Risk Reduction, captures this urgency: invest now, or pay exponentially later.

Short-term restoration of strategically important corridors like the BP Highway must go concurrently with long-term resilience planning.  Roads should be realigned away from unstable river bends where possible, with major corridors upgraded for at least 100-year floods, and slope protection integrated with river training works such as spurs and check structures.

Design standards must evolve beyond the historical averages to incorporate the plausible future scenarios. Climate risk screening and cost-benefit justification for resilience measures should be mandatory for detailed project reports. Increasing hydrometeorological networks and interleaving vulnerability mapping into road asset management will help prioritize investment where it matters most.

While these reforms seem costly, prevention is the cheapest insurance. Global evidence shows that every dollar spent on resilience saves at least four are saved in recovery. For Nepal, with annual road repair costs already exceeding Rs 3 billion, the choice is obvious.

The road ahead

While decisive early action can be effective in minimizing risks, it cannot substitute for durable infrastructure. Preparedness can save lives, but only resilience saves livelihoods.

The BP Highway disaster is more than just a damaged road; it serves as a warning. The next storm is imminent. Safeguarding every trip, whether to school, the market, or home, requires investing in resilience now, not in repairs later.

(Rajan KC is a civil/geotechnical engineer working on disaster mitigation and resilient infrastructure.)

India’s neighborhood policy is often described in shorthand: “relative decline,” “looking beyond South Asia,” “losing the periphery.” That lens misses something important about the last four years. In Afghanistan and Myanmar, India has been dealing not with normal neighbors but with collapsing or radically transformed states. The question, then, is not whether India has expanded its influence, but whether it has managed to stay engaged, protect its basic interests, and avoid strategic paralysis. On that narrower, but more realistic, metric, India’s record since 2021 in both theaters looks more constructive than the declinist narrative suggests.

Afghanistan is the sharper break. When the Taliban took Kabul in August 2021, India essentially lost a twenty-year investment in the Islamic Republic and had to evacuate its missions. For almost a year, New Delhi kept a formal distance, while routing limited assistance through multilateral channels and the UN. That phase ended in mid-2022. In June 2022, India sent its first official delegation to Kabul under Joint-secretary JP Singh, who met with the acting Foreign Minister, Amir Khan Muttaqi, and reviewed India’s humanitarian projects and security concerns. Shortly afterwards, India deployed a “technical team” to Kabul, re-establishing a minimal diplomatic presence focused on aid delivery and the safety of Indian projects and personnel. 

Humanitarian assistance became the main language of engagement. Between 2021 and 2023, India transported large consignments of wheat, medicines and COVID-19 vaccines to Afghanistan. By mid-2022, New Delhi had already shipped 33,000 metric tonnes of wheat against a commitment of 50,000 MT. Subsequent statements and reports show that this was not a one-off gesture, but a sustained effort: budget documents for 2023–24 earmarked fresh aid for Afghanistan, and Indian officials emphasised that assistance was being coordinated with international agencies to reach ordinary Afghans, despite political complications. 

Shipments of wheat, essential medicines and winter supplies continued through 2023 and 2024, with Indian media framing this as part of a broader humanitarian posture. In 2025, when earthquakes hit western Afghanistan, India again sent emergency consignments of food, tents and medical kits, reinforcing a pattern where India presents itself not as a patron of any faction, but as a consistent responder to Afghan crises.

Alongside aid, there has been a slow but deliberate upgrade of political contact. After the initial 2022 visit, Indian officials made at least two more trips to Kabul; in March 2024, JP Singh again met Muttaqi in Kabul to discuss economic cooperation, including Afghan use of the Chabahar port. In January 2025, Foreign Secretary Vinay Mohan Kwatra met Muttaqi in Dubai, signaling that Afghanistan had been moved back up to the higher levels of India’s diplomatic bandwidth.  

The real inflexion point, though, came in Oct 2025, when Muttaqi finally traveled to New Delhi after the UN Security Council temporarily lifted his travel ban. This was the first visit by a senior Taliban leader to India since 2021; he met External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar for discussions covering trade, health, terrorism and consular issues. During this visit, India announced that its technical mission in Kabul would be upgraded to a full embassy, effectively restoring normal diplomatic status, while still insisting that recognition of the Taliban government would depend on its internal conduct, particularly on issues such as women’s rights.

If you line up that chronology, from complete withdrawal in 2021 to humanitarian re-entry in 2022, to working-level political contact in 2022–24, to foreign minister-level engagement and full embassy restoration in 2025. At each step, New Delhi has been careful to frame its actions as support for the Afghan people rather than endorsement of the regime. But it has also accepted that a neighborhood policy that pretends the Taliban do not exist would only hand Afghanistan entirely to Pakistan, China, and Iran. In that limited sense, India’s Afghan engagement since 2021 appears relatively successful: New Delhi has managed to extricate itself from strategic irrelevance without compromising all of its normative positions.

Myanmar presents a unique challenge: not regime change, but a state fragmenting under the weight of a civil war. The February 2021 coup overthrew the elected National League for Democracy government and restored direct military rule, pushing the country into a nationwide conflict between the junta, multiple Ethnic Armed Organisations (EAOs), and the People’s Defence Forces (PDFs) aligned with the national unity government. Over four years later, studies such as the International Crisis Group (ICG)’s 2025 briefing argue that the junta still controls the capital and some urban nodes but is losing ground across much of the periphery, where armed groups now hold extensive territory and run parallel administrations.

For India, this is not a distant issue. The conflict washes directly onto a 1,643-kilometer border, feeding refugee flows, arms trafficking and insurgent sanctuary, and complicating major connectivity projects like the India-Myanmar-Thailand Trilateral Highway and the Kaladan Multimodal Transit Transport Project. India’s first instinct after the coup was conservative: to maintain lines of communication with the State Administration Council in Naypyitaw, privately push for restraint, and try to insulate border cooperation and infrastructure projects from the turmoil. That approach reflected habits built over decades of working with Myanmar’s military on counter-insurgency along the North-East frontier and on connectivity to Southeast Asia. At the same time, New Delhi avoided endorsing the coup. Its public statements called for the restoration of democracy and the release of political prisoners, but unlike Western capitals, it did not cut off engagement.

As the conflict deepened and armed resistance spread into Chin, Sagaing, Kachin and Rakhine, that one-dimensional strategy became untenable. New Delhi has gradually moved toward a multi-vector engagement. On one track, it has continued to host and engage with junta-linked actors; for example, in November 2024, India received a delegation of Myanmar military officers and allied politicians for discussions on federalism and conflict resolution. On another front, India has begun to engage with the opposition and ethnic groups. In September 2024, New Delhi quietly invited political and military opponents of the junta, including representatives of anti-regime EAOs, to a seminar on constitutionalism and federalism, an unprecedented step for a state that has usually treated the Myanmar military as its primary counterpart.

The ICG’s 2025 analysis goes further, arguing that Indian officials have established regular channels with several border-based insurgent groups to manage cross-border security and maintain some leverage in territories the junta no longer controls. A striking example of this adaptive posture is found in the realm of critical minerals. In 2025, Reuters reported that India was exploring a rare-earth supply arrangement with the Kachin Independence Army, which controls a key rare-earth mining hub on the Chinese border, having pushed out junta-aligned forces. The Ministry of Mines has reportedly requested that Indian Rare Earths Limited and a private firm collect and test samples from KIA-held mines. This is highly unusual: India is contemplating a resource partnership not with a recognized government but with a non-state armed group that happens to control the ground. It tells you something about how far Myanmar’s internal map has shifted, and how India is willing to adjust when rigid state-centric instruments no longer work.

At the same time, India is tightening the formal border architecture in response to the spillover of Myanmar’s war into the Northeast. In 2024, the Home Ministry announced plans to fence the entire India–Myanmar border and review the Free Movement Regime that allowed hill communities to cross relatively freely within a limited radius. The aim is to reduce the flow of armed fighters, narcotics and illicit arms that have been feeding violence in Manipur and elsewhere. A Reuters investigation in late 2024 documented how Indian militants who had taken refuge in Myanmar and fought in its civil war were now returning with sophisticated weapons, aggravating ethnic conflict in Manipur. From New Delhi’s vantage point, border management is not a narrow policing issue but a core component of its neighborhood strategy in the face of Myanmar’s internal disintegration.

Put together, India’s Myanmar policy today has three layers: continued engagement with the junta to keep projects and basic state-to-state mechanisms alive; calibrated outreach to anti-regime forces where they are the de facto authorities, especially along the border and in resource-rich zones; and a hardening of its own border in response to security externalities. None of this is pretty, and it does not resolve Myanmar’s crisis. However, it has allowed India to retain access and negotiating rights across the spectrum of actors, rather than placing all its bets on a regime that no longer controls the country it claims to rule.

A broader assessment of India’s neighborhood policy must therefore account for the conditions under which diplomacy is being conducted. Afghanistan and Myanmar are not ordinary neighbors; both are undergoing profound state fragility, contested sovereignties and intense external penetration. In such environments, the conventional metrics of influence, regime change, policy alignment or political stabilisation are neither realistic nor analytically useful. A more appropriate benchmark is whether India has been able to retain strategic access, preserve essential equities and construct channels of engagement that prevent its marginalization. Judged against this criterion, India’s post-2021 approach appears less a story of retreat and more an example of calibrated adaptation to structural volatility.

In Afghanistan, India has established a minimal yet resilient diplomatic presence, centered on humanitarian assistance and selective diplomatic engagement, while maintaining a deliberate distance from formal recognition. This approach has enabled New Delhi to remain part of the evolving regional conversation on Afghanistan, at a time when the distribution of influence is fluid and subject to shifts in Taliban-Pakistan and Taliban-China relations. In Myanmar, India has moved beyond a strictly state-centric posture and acknowledged the empirical reality of dispersed authority. Its engagement with the junta, border-based ethnic organizations and local administrative actors reflects an attempt to craft a multilayered diplomatic strategy suited to a fragmented political landscape, while simultaneously protecting its own border stability and connectivity ambitions.

These approaches do not resolve the underlying crises in either country, nor do they eliminate the normative tensions that accompany engagement with contested authorities. However, they do illustrate a broader transformation in India’s neighborhood policy: a willingness to operate within imperfect political conditions, to utilize multiple diplomatic vectors simultaneously, and to safeguard long-term interests through pragmatic, rather than maximalist, means. In that sense, India’s conduct in Afghanistan and Myanmar demonstrates that constructive engagement remains possible even in the most inhospitable corners of its neighbourhood, provided the goals are recalibrated to match the constraints of the regional environment.

The author is a PhD candidate at the School of International Studies, JNU, New Delhi

As global leaders gather at COP30 in Brazil to negotiate finance, adaptation, and loss and damage, Nepal’s 2025 monsoon season offers a stark reminder of why climate-vulnerable countries need stronger recognition and support. From slow-onset droughts in the plains to catastrophic glacial floods and colossal landslides in the mountains, Nepal’s experience illustrates how climate variability is already inflicting deep human, economic, and ecological losses—despite the country’s negligible contribution to global emissions. 

According to the German Watch’s Climate Risk Index 2025, Nepal averages nearly 250 deaths annually from climate-related disasters, with roughly 75,840 people directly affected each year. The economic cost of such events is also substantial, amounting to an estimated $221.3m—or 0.258 percent of the national GDP—underscoring the persistent human and financial toll of climate-induced hazards

Nepal’s 2025 monsoon opened with extended dry conditions across Southern plains; mainly Madhes Province, where rainfall from June to mid-July fell to less than one-third of normal levels during the critical paddy transplantation period. With worsening soil moisture and visible crop stress, the provincial government declared drought on July 24. Yet only weeks later, it brought severe downpours mainly across Madhes, inundating ripening paddy fields and low-lying settlements and causing damage worth billions of rupees. The abrupt shift from drought to heavy flood within the same season is emblematic of climate-driven rapid extremes now harming smallholder farmers who lack buffers to absorb repeated shocks.

The situation intensified even after the official monsoon withdrawal. Multiple post-monsoon rain systems—amplified by two unexpected but powerful cyclones on Oct 4-5 and again on Oct 30-31—brought extreme rainfall during Nepal’s peak harvest season, destroying crops of billions rupees worth, stored grain, and essential infrastructure. These late-season events have heightened national anxiety about Nepal’s changing monsoon behaviour and the possibility of more frequent cyclone-linked hazards in the future.

High-altitude regions faced even more severe climate-induced damage. Amid lingering fears from last year’s catastrophic Thame incident in the Khumbu region, Nepal faced another shock on 8 July when a transboundary glacial lake outburst flood (GLOF), originating in China’s Tibetan Autonomous Region, surged into Rasuwa District through Bhote Koshi river. It killed 10 people, left 19 missing, destroyed the Rasuwagadhi friendship bridge, damaged hydropower facilities, flattened the dry port, swept away cargo trucks, and disrupted cross-border trade. Losses were estimated at Rs 2.5bn, and insurance claims reached nearly Rs 1bn. For Nepal, this event underscored the country’s exposure to hazards that originate beyond its borders—a key issue Nepal continues to raise at COP30 within the global Loss and Damage framework.

Beyond infrastructure losses, climate-induced non-economic damages—psychosocial stress, displacement, health impacts, lost educational days, and erosion of cultural and natural heritage—remain largely unaddressed in national relief systems. These burdens fall disproportionately on women, elderly residents, low-income families, and indigenous communities, widening existing inequalities and undermining long-term resilience.

Despite these mounting challenges, Nepal is also making notable progress in reducing human casualties. The 2025 monsoon spanned 135 days—longer than average, with onset on May 29 and withdrawal on Oct 10—bringing near-normal rainfall yet resulting in significantly fewer deaths and injuries than in previous years. Disaster incidents fell by 32 percent, deaths by 70 percent, and affected households nearly halved. These gains reflect improved forecasting, stronger institutional coordination led by NDRRMA, and community-level preparedness also supported by the development partners at local level. 

Madhes Province demonstrated how accessible warning systems can directly reduce loss and damage. SMS alerts, radio updates, and volunteer networks enabled households to protect livestock, food stocks, and essential assets. While economic losses were considerable, no fatalities were recorded—underscoring the life-saving value of localized, people-centered early warning systems. Similarly, in the downstream areas of Karnali, flood early warning mechanisms proved crucial in minimizing both human and property losses. Development partners, under Climate Resilience Measures for Community (CRMC) projects, working with national authorities and local communities, strengthened both the hardware—such as flood and rainfall sensors—and the software components, including community awareness and emergency preparedness. Together, these interventions showed that timely information and local readiness remain Nepal’s strongest defense against escalating climate risks

Across municipalities, bamboo-based bio-dykes, riverbank reinforcement, sandbagging, and pre-positioned emergency supplies helped prevent larger-scale devastation. These low-cost, community-driven measures highlight the importance of social capital and local knowledge in resilience-building.

However, substantial vulnerabilities persist. Ilam recorded the highest fatalities (39). Rasuwa suffered catastrophic economic losses. Trekking corridors and high-altitude settlements still lack reliable communication networks, leaving residents and tourists without timely warnings. And the increasing frequency of post-monsoon cyclone-driven rain systems threatens the stability of Nepal’s agricultural calendar.

Why COP30 must acknowledge Nepal’s climate reality

Despite Nepal’s minimal emission yet timely National Determined Contribution (NDC) submission along with Biennial Transparency Report (BTR) stating its full commitment to carbon neutrality by 2045, the country continues to face severe climate-induced loss and damage. The new Loss & Damage Fund at COP30 is promising, but predictable, accessible finance is urgently needed to protect communities bearing the brunt of crises they did not create.

Key questions for COP30: Who is responsible for escalating losses? How can vulnerable nations access reliable funding for preparedness and recovery? How can non-economic losses—culture, health, education—be addressed?

Nepal’s experiences with glacial lake outburst floods, drought–flood cycles, and cyclone-linked extremes show that adaptation alone is insufficient. Policy priorities include community-based monitoring, risk-informed land-use planning with phased relocation, nature-based solutions, and integrating non-economic losses into planning.

The 2025 monsoon is a stark reminder: those least responsible for climate change are suffering the most. Ensuring Nepal’s concerns are acted upon is essential for a fair, resilient, and climate-just future.

The last few generations have grown up believing that schools are places of learning while prisons are popularly perceived as stations of punishment eventually intended for improvisation or reformation. Despite having clear and unassailable distinctions, if we look closely, the line between the two sometimes feels blurred these days; and, sadly, the first is inheriting qualities of the latter. Globally, prisons are now being proactively reimagined as reform centers, but our schools, ironically, are increasingly resembling as sites of sentencing or tantamount to quasi-prisons.

Government and community schoolteachers in the nation are often and repeatedly protesting, inter alia, on demand of professional growth and security while nearly 7.5m students are grappling for the commendable academic characters and conducts. Some semi-possessed reporting from the government agencies confirm that—among schoolable children—around 60 percent flow to government schools and the rest in private ones, which are mushrooming from major thoroughfares to every nook and corners of cities plus suburbs. 

In cities, however, nearly 80 percent of children are boarded in private institutions. For parents willing to enroll their wards in privately-owned schools, choosing it becomes one of the stressful decisions, often driven by convenience, family relocation, standard complex or peer pressure. Schools, meanwhile, compete with one another through flashy banners, glossy advertisements and promises of modern facilities, quality education, holistic development and myriads of other magnificent commitments. An ingrained obsession of presenting self as bigger and better schools has been an indefensibly burdensome luxury that many are professedly proclaiming. Nonetheless, most of the claims are mere meaningless myths.  

Meaningless myth

A dangerous misconception has taken root and often been tough to be chopped out: the idea that schools with skyrocketing buildings, multiplexes, exorbitant fees, techno-driven show-ups, lifts and swimming pools and larger enrollments are automatically the best. In truth, the smaller the class size, the greater the attention a child receives, and the more effective the learning goes. Schools should be foundations, carefully laying down habits and curiosity. 

Universities, by contrast, are where specialized and collective mass learning happens. At the very crude stage of experiencing academic milieu and joy, many schools are pompously heading to burden the fresh cum immature minds with unreasonable overloads that ultimately rankles them remarkably in regular course of their later academic entourage. Learning in the first phase of schooling in home-spawn context and language may be pretty easy and evidently doable as well.

Contrary to the utmost sense, many schools are distorting pre-supposed fine-tuned balance by utterly overburdening children with an obsession for English from the very earliest grades. Language is important, but it is only a medium—not the destination. What truly matters is the ability to think, to reason, to feel, to conceptualize and to cognate. Instead of nurturing these qualities, some schools prioritize rote memorization of English words, producing students who may sound fluent but lack critical and creative thoughts. The eventual outcome is mere English-murmuring machines, not independent thinkers.

Another problem lies in the weight of expectations—sometimes literally. In many cases, the schoolbag of almost all children is almost as heavy as the children themselves. Exacerbating the situation, countless textbooks and impractically time-consuming overload of homework have turned learning into drudgery and have even disturbingly occupied the parents in most cases.

Students who are deprived of adequate rest, who are frightened of not completing assignments or who equate school with fear are unlikely to develop a lifelong love of learning. Surveys show that parents often end up helping their children late into the night, feeding them as they scribble homework. Schools that pile on such busy work are not raising resilient learners but anxious children who see school as a place of punishment rather than discovery. The balance between envisioning, expectation and experience is quite brittle.

Brittle balance 

What is forgotten is that true education extends beyond classrooms and assignments. Expected academic growth and shrewd sense also stems from simple conversations with parents, sharing what one has learnt, playing with friends, helping at home, joining in community life and creatively engaging into disseminating their learning among pals and parents. These activities not only strengthen academic foundations but also foster mental health and social maturity. Unfortunately, many private schools have remained deliberately indifferent and malignant to accept the fact and adopt the appropriate mechanism in this front. 

Adding to the burden, the culture of multitasking mania has been a perishing pleasure. After long school hours, children are often pushed into music, dance, drawing, karate, swimming, horse riding—even archery—without any thought for their actual interests or capacities. Parents, eager to provide everything, risk overwhelming their children in the process. For some, the exhaustion begins with the time commute: hours on a bus to and from school. Fatigue alone can kill curiosity to a great extent. 

Many such things posed and impulsively prescribed to children are proscribing the natural growth, usual mastery and expected smartness. In fact, deposited anticipations are stymied and unknowingly preempted.  

Ironically, earlier generations who began as average students often grew stronger over time. Through gradual self-learning and hard work, they matured by the time higher education determined their career avenues. They knew the value of effort and were motivated to succeed evidently at the level which would capaciously contribute to the projected processional path.

Today, many students are excessively overloaded at the school level but they grow disillusioned when reaching university. In fact, many are found to have fully lost the energy, interest, aura and passion for learning given the pressure and stress in schools. The crucial stage of education meant to shape their professions receives them burnt-out, lax and indifferent. Statistics show students excelling at school but increasingly faltering in higher education, eventually leveling out as average in professional life.

The world’s best education systems share a common trait: school learning is easy, natural and enjoyable. Rigorous hard work comes later, but the school years prioritize growth in line with a child’s natural rhythm. A stone house may appear plain but is sturdy, hygienic and lasting; a glass palace may dazzle but is fragile and fleeting. Flashy, expensive, “hi-fi” schooling is the glass palace—grand in appearance, obviously unsustainable in reality.

Time to reflect

As parents, everyone must pause. Each ought to question: are we sending children to schools that nurture curiosity, resilience and social maturity? Or are we, perhaps unintentionally, placing them in educational prisons—burdened by books, trapped by homework and locked in a cycle of anxiety?

The answer depends not on how tall the building is or how expensive the fees are, but on how well the school balances academic rigor with natural growth, creativity and humanity. Are we schooling our wards on fashion or mission? The reality is that learners are grounded rather than growing, by and large.