IMAGE: REUTERS
WHEN A GOVERNMENT marks its first hundred days by issuing its own report card, and that report card says 87.2%, two things are worth noting. First, who gave them that grade. Second, who counted differently. On July 4th government spokesperson and Education Minister Sasmit Pokharel stood at a Singha Durbar press conference and announced that 70 of the 100 reform points the Rastriya Swatantra Party had pledged were fully complete, with most of the rest in progress. Four days earlier, the Kathmandu Post’s own team had counted independently and found that only 38 of those 100 commitments had actually been honoured. The difference is a disagreement about what counts as done in Nepal’s new government, and it captures the hundred days in miniature.
Those hundred days have been busy. The number of federal ministries was cut from 22 to 18 with the government claiming annual savings of some Rs20bn. More than 207,000 passports and 808,000 driving licences were delivered through the postal network, a mundane-sounding reform that matters enormously to people who previously had to travel to a district office to collect documents.
The Property Investigation Commission collected over 11,000 asset declarations and began documenting alleged illegal wealth accumulated by public officials between 2006 and 2026. A bill on money laundering, one on cooperatives, one on public procurement and a fourth on health science academies all passed the National Assembly on July 4th itself, clearing a legislative logjam that had persisted for months. On economic policy, Finance Minister Swarnim Wagle delivered Nepal’s largest-ever budget. These are not nothing.
What sits alongside all of this, and what the 87.2% rating glosses over, is the question of how things were done rather than what was done. The government completed only three of the twelve laws it had pledged to enact in its first hundred days. The rest were handled through executive ordinances, laws passed by the cabinet alone rather than through parliament, despite the RSP holding a parliamentary majority that makes the normal legislative route entirely available to them.
Critics inside and outside the RSP have pointed out that a government elected on a mandate of clean process has been more cozy bypassing its own parliament than any of the messy coalitions it replaced. Pranaya Rana, one of Nepal’s most reliable political commentators, put the problem like this: Shah cannot simultaneously cut the bureaucracy and allow his personal advisors to act as pseudo-ministers, issuing instructions to senior officials and even ambassadors in ways that elected ministers never authorised.
The advisors issue has become the most interesting subplot of the first hundred days. Three of Shah’s close associates, Asim Shah, Bibek Mishra and Madhav Khanal, have reportedly wielded authority that their formal role as advisors does not grant them. One episode involved the passport printing contract with German companies Veridos and Muehlbauer. When CIAA investigators were persuaded to target the firms, the German side invited Nepal’s representative in Berlin for a conversation, which several Nepali outlets reported as a formal diplomatic protest.
The German embassy in Kathmandu had to clarify that it was an invitation, not a protest, and no protest note was ever handed over. The advisors drove the government to the edge of a diplomatic incident over a procurement case the German engineers say they had already demonstrably resolved. The public, as Rana noted, voted for Shah. Nobody voted for his advisors.
The foreign policy picture is similarly uneven. Khanal’s two-capital sprint, visiting New Delhi and then Beijing in back-to-back weeks, was well-handled and produced some tangible agreements. But Shah himself has still not made an official visit to either neighbour, the first Nepali prime minister in recent memory to reach a hundred days without doing so.
For a government that has spoken extensively about sovereignty and equidistance, the actual work of managing the two most important bilateral relationships has been delegated entirely to officials without the prime ministerial weight to make commitments stick.
Rabi Lamichhane, the RSP’s party chairman who controls the organisation from outside the cabinet, was characteristically measured in his own hundred-day assessment: “It has been a good start, but it will take two to three years for the results to be seen.” That is a realistic framing from someone positioned to absorb the credit either way. The Kathmandu Post editorial landed harder: “Even on an expressway, it only takes one missed turn to meet with an accident.” Shah himself has said the government is driving on that expressway and will not hit the brakes.
Three years of braking distance remain. How many of those 100 promises actually count as delivered, and what it costs to push the others through, is now the only question that matters. ■
