We need a research funding council

It should be state funded and functionally autonomous of political and bureaucratic interference.

For about 50 years now, Nepali social scientists have been demanding that we should have an entity that funds social science research in the country. The generation of Nepali social scientists who came of age in the early 1970s was the first to make this demand. I suspect that their call was influenced by what they had seen and heard in other countries regarding how such funding councils had enabled research in general. Some of them were also familiar with the fact that a few of their videshi contemporaries had come to do research in Nepal with financial support from such research councils.