IMAGE: SRIJANA SHARMA
ONE IN THREE people in Nepal’s far-western province live below the poverty line. The national average is one in five. According to the Fourth Nepal Living Standards Survey (2022-23) by the National Statistics Office, Sudurpaschim records the country’s highest absolute poverty rate at 34.16%. At the district level, the contrast is uglier still: Achham in Sudurpaschim has a poverty rate of 49.58%, while Kaski in Gandaki Province registers 5.63%. These two districts are governed by the same federal budget and separated by a developmental chasm that the phrase “national average” obscures.
The data do not support the political representation argument. Sudurpaschim has produced three prime ministers in Nepal’s democratic era. The government’s 2025 Small Area Estimation of Poverty report places six local units of Sudurpaschim among the country’s ten poorest. Political representation and development are different things; in Nepal’s case, having a prime minister from the far west has historically meant that the far west produced the prime minister, not that the prime minister produced anything for the far west.
The incentive structure of Nepali politics rewards national positioning and coalition management. The returns from reducing Achham’s poverty rate are not seen in a Kathmandu press conference and do not translate into the alliances that keep a government in office.
The human cost is more brutal than the poverty rate. The National Nutrition Assessment Campaign 2026 screened 93,892 children in the province and found 9,487 suffering from acute malnutrition, including 1,776 cases of severe acute malnutrition. The province’s overall malnutrition rate stands at 10.10%. Public health expert Gyanendra Dawadi said the World Health Organisation classifies this level as serious. The Nepal Demographic and Health Survey 2022 shows that 28% of children in Sudurpaschim are stunted, compared with the national average of 25%. Bajura records the province’s worst figures, with stunting affecting 48.8% of children. A child stunted at two years old carries that developmental deficit for life; it affects cognitive capacity, educational attainment, adult productivity and the poverty rate of the next generation. Sudurpaschim is not merely poor now; it is producing the conditions that will keep it poor.
The underlying reasons for this persistence are geographic and political, and they reinforce each other. Sudurpaschim is Nepal’s most remote province; its nine districts include some of the least accessible terrain in the Himalayas. The cost of delivering goods and services there is higher than anywhere else in the country, and the return on investment from building infrastructure such as roads, health posts and schools is lower per capita than in denser, more accessible provinces.
A government optimising its capital budget for maximum development impact should spend disproportionately in Sudurpaschim precisely because the deprivation is greatest. A government optimising its capital budget for political return should spend in Bagmati and Gandaki, where the constituencies are larger, the media coverage is denser and the ribbon-cutting ceremonies are photographed. Nepal’s capital spending has historically followed the second logic while announcing the first.
The Human Development Report 2024 shows the province’s Human Development Index at 0.601, below the national average of 0.622. The HDI gap is smaller than the poverty gap might suggest, in part because health and education indicators in Sudurpaschim have improved more than income indicators. The province has schools and health posts; the ghost offices problem applies here too, but there are at least buildings. What it lacks is the economic density that converts health and education investments into income and productivity.
The migration trend compounds the problem. Sudurpaschim sends a disproportionate share of its young men to the Gulf and Malaysia. The remittances that return sustain household consumption but do not build productive capacity. The World Bank concluded in its 2025 Nepal Country Economic Memorandum that “while remittances have buoyed private consumption and reduced poverty, they have not translated into substantial job creation or productivity gains across key economic sectors”.
In Sudurpaschim specifically, the men who leave are often the ones who would have been farmers, traders or small entrepreneurs. Their absence leaves households dependent on transfer payments while the local economy stagnates. The agriculture that remains is subsistence-level; the women and elderly who continue it are not reaching markets.
In fiscal year 2023-24 Gandaki achieved 4.6% economic growth while Sudurpaschim recorded just 3.4%. The compounding effect of that differential, sustained over years, is a province that falls further behind even when it grows. Because Gandaki is growing faster from a higher base, the gap between them does not narrow; it widens in absolute terms even when both provinces show positive growth rates.
The Balendra Shah government’s budget for 2026-27 contains provisions for royalty revenue redistribution, infrastructure investment and the Alternative Development Finance Fund. None of these specifically targets Sudurpaschim’s problem with enough resources or enough focus to change the trajectory that forty years of democracy have not changed. Brij BK, head of the Outpatient Therapeutic Care Centre in Muktikot, Bajura, said eight children are receiving treatment for severe acute malnutrition and sixteen for moderate malnutrition. He said it this year, in the same terse language that health workers in the far west have used for decades, to journalists who periodically arrive, write the story and leave.
The story has been written before. The poverty rate has not substantially moved. Sudurpaschim’s problem is not that Nepal does not know it exists: it is that knowing it exists and fixing it are different challenges. The second one requires sustained political attention to a province that cannot, by any political calculus, deliver enough votes or enough press coverage to compete with Kathmandu’s demands on the same budget. ■
