Time to let go

Local governments should be empowered enough to shoulder the responsibility of education.

Nepal's local level governments, after completing their first term, have translated the idea of federalism into action. What’s more, their performance in the very first term, when they were still learning the basic tenets of decentralised democracy, cannot be termed unsatisfactory at all, despite having to face the undemocratic manoeuvres of federal institutions during the same period. But if there is one sector that has failed to bear fruit from Nepal’s transition to federalism, it is education. Not only has the government failed to draft a federal education bill, it has yet to come to terms with the fact that secondary level education is now a constitutionally mandated prerogative of local governments.