Public Policy: Affairs In Nepal

Introduction:

A policy is well formed document that describe principles of actions of any organization, government or an individual. A public policy is directly connected with government. It describe the relationship of government with people. Any policy that impact the general public can be considered as public policy. This article will discuss about the different issues on why public policies in Nepal are not implemented well and are not capable of yielding expected output.

(PC: Bucknell University)

Background

First of all, we must go through the source of policy formulation in Nepal. Theoretically, the policies must be formulated on the basis of Constitutional directions and theory, National Program and Plan, to address demands of the public on specific issue, pressure form the civil society etc. But, we can see that polices have not been formulated solely on these bases, they are mostly influenced by the political leader's interest (not form the political party interest), for the benefits of specific group of people (not for the benefits of common people). This is the challenging problem that policies in Nepal are not formulated on the basis of open discussion, taking the voice of common people, participating the stakeholder in the drafting process.

Problems:

On the basis of above mentioned facts, the major problem that most of the policies in Nepal have been never implemented even though they were very good in principle, is the co-ordination gap between different government entity as well as other policy stakeholders. For example, The Boardband policy is prepared by ministry of communication but it impact other sector of governance as well. So the ministry should study other related policy in the field of information communication technology, before drafting any ICT related policy. The broadband and telecom policy have many similar provision as in  Information Technology Policy that has been prepared by Ministry of science and technology.

In Nepal, Policies are formulated in high speed, sometime within one night if it is necessary for the interest of leaders. They never focused on the  collection of information, facts and feedback related to the issue that the proposed policy is going to address. Also the beurocratic high personal sometime mislead leader due to their own career or posting or similar advantages.

On the other hand, we never prioritize the policy and program, that directly impact the later stage. We proposed so many project and program in a single fiscal year and don't complete a single projects within that year. It is all due to the lack of assigning priority and budget to a single/valuable/necessary project. 

The last but not the least, to implement each and every policy, our government don't have sufficient resource, both qualified human resource as well as financial resources. In addition, Nepal is situated in between two giant country: china and India, both are the evolving power of the world, government policies in Nepal are often influenced by external entities such as Neighboring country, International Donner Agency and INGO's.

Conclusion

To come up with these problems, the policy maker should be aware of that how they can increase the participation of stakeholder during the policy formulation process, about the co-ordination between different implementation agency  and availability of resource to implement the policy. Also, the policy makers also need to negotiate with Donner Agency as well as external forces on behalf of Nation's welfare and goodness.

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