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SADIKSHYA SHRESTHA is 23 years old, lives in Lalitpur and voted for Balendra Shah’s Rastriya Swatantra Party in March because she believed the campaign promise. “As the government had stated in their manifesto that they would lessen the number of youths going abroad for employment and instead create it here,” she told ANII, an Indian news agency, in April, one month after Shah was sworn in, “until now, none of the significant steps have been taken in that area.” She said it without bitterness. She was just noticing what was, and wasn’t, happening.
She is one of the voters who put a party in power on a promise: 1.2m new jobs, enough to slow the flood of young Nepalis leaving for the Gulf and Malaysia. Not 1.2m jobs eventually, or aspirationally, or over an undefined horizon. In the campaign language, it was an actionable commitment to reduce forced migration. It is now July. The government has been in office for just over three months. And the labour approval figures for Nepalis going abroad are running higher than at any point in recorded history.
Before going further, it is worth saying what this article is not. It is not a verdict. Balendra Shah took office on March 27th. Three and a half months is not enough time to build a factory, attract an industrial park, restructure a labour market or change the fundamental economics that have been pushing 450,000 young Nepalis or so into the job market every year—a labour market the formal economy has never, in recent memory, absorbed at that rate.
Judging this government’s job-creation record at three months is roughly like reviewing a construction project after the first week of site clearance. The real question is not whether it has failed yet. It is whether anything it has done points towards 1.2m jobs; or whether that number was always the kind of campaign promise that arrives empty. On that question, the picture is sobering.
The budget Finance Minister Swarnim Wagle presented on May 29th targets 7% economic growth and contains several provisions aimed at job creation: a Rs730m startup loan fund; plans for an AI computing centre; a commitment to 500,000 technology sector jobs over ten years; and an Alternative Development Finance Fund with Rs100bn in authorised capital. These are real policy choices, not nothing.
Yet even taken together, they are measures aimed at creating the conditions for job growth over years, rather than at delivering 1.2m jobs within a term. The startup fund is Rs0.7bn rupees in a country where the entire capital budget is some Rs431bn. The AI computing centre is a plan for a plan. The 500,000 tech jobs target, spread over a decade, averages 50,000 a year in a sector that currently employs 100,000 total after three decades of growth.
The big problem predates Shah by generations. Economist Keshav Acharya said it plainly on the campaign trail: “Nepal was always an agricultural economy, and it directly shifted to the service sector. The politicians here bypassed the manufacturing sector, which created this crisis of jobs.” Manufacturing absorbs large numbers of people at moderate skill levels. It was what pulled hundreds of millions of workers into the formal economy in China, Vietnam and Bangladesh. Nepal never built it. The RSP’s platform, like every platform before it, contains no serious plan to build it now.
What it does contain is a digital economy strategy in a country where 40% of people still lack internet access: which means the jobs being planned are, even in principle, available only to the 60% already connected.
What the government has delivered in its first three months is accountability. Former prime minister K.P. Sharma Oli was arrested on charges of criminal negligence. The business corruption case sweeping up the Shanker Group, the Golchha Organisation and Infinity Holdings produced 29 prosecution recommendations totalling Rs20bn or so in claimed damages. These are commendable interventions in a country where impunity has been the default for decades, genuinely significant.
They are also not jobs. Arresting corrupt people does not, in the short run, create employment. In the medium run it might, as cleaner procurement and higher foreign direct investment could eventually follow from more credible rule of law. But that transmission takes years and is not guaranteed.
There is also a growing concern, voiced by political analyst Deepak Thapa in the Kathmandu Post: that Shah’s early governance style is starting to show “authoritarian and populist tendencies”, with critics accusing him of “bypassing democratic norms, ignoring due process, and centralising decision-making”.
His supporters would argue that the institutional culture being disrupted was the problem. But jobs ultimately come from private investment, and private investment needs predictable rules. A government that centralises discretion and moves by impulse makes the investment climate less predictable, and not more.
The FNCCI had described business morale as at an all-time low in January, two months before Shah even took office. Nothing in the three months since has drastically shifted that sentiment upwards.
The RSP was swept to power by young people who had, in September, burned government buildings and accepted bullets to force an accounting with the old system. What they wanted was not complicated: a government that treated Nepal as a country worth building a career in. Sadikshya Shrestha’s comment captures where that expectation stands four months after the election. She is not yet disappointed. She is watching. The difference between those two states is shrinking. And the number of young Nepalis boarding flights at Tribhuvan Airport on any given morning is not. ■
