Sasmit Pokharel, the Minister for Education, Science and Technology, comes among the well-read members of the cabinet led by Prime Minister Balendra Shah. At a time when public fatigue with rhetoric-heavy and action-light governance has accumulated over decades, such a profile carries both symbolic and practical weight. The country certainly deserves more. And there is a sense of optimism that Pokharel could be among those long anticipated to deliver in the education sector.
The saying goes that expectation is an asset, but a fragile one. It rests not only on intent, but on clarity, coherence, and discipline in policy action. Among supporters of Nepal’s current political shift, there has been a conscious effort to sustain confidence in the government’s capacity to perform, driven in part by the perception that viable alternatives remain extremely limited. The stakes, therefore, are unusually high. Failure here would not be routine. It would risk reinforcing a deeper cycle of public disillusionment.
It is within this context that the recent decision, the very first and major one, by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology to ban entrance preparation classes and “bridge courses” has generated unease. The rationale behind the move carries merit. It responds to concerns around student well-being, disparities in access, and the escalating financial burden on households. However, the policy, in its current form, risks missing its intended effect. Without addressing the structural drivers that sustain demand for such courses, the ban is likely to prove counterproductive. Left as it stands, it will re-emerge in more entrenched and unregulated forms.
There are reasons for this. First, the communication of the decision itself demands scrutiny. The initial announcement suggested a blanket prohibition, extending from school level to higher education, framed as a corrective measure against psychological pressure, unequal access, and rising costs for students. The move was widely circulated and, in many quarters, welcomed as long overdue. Yet within hours, Minister Pokharel narrowed the scope, limiting the ban to courses up to Grade 12. The earlier position was quietly withdrawn. A subsequent clarification, this time from the Ministry spokesperson, further diluted the position, indicating that similar programs for higher-level would only be curtailed if they violated existing laws. This provision was nothing new since it had always existed.What began as a sweeping reform thus quickly descended into ambiguity.
These successive revisions make it difficult to treat the episode as a mere communication issue. They point instead to a deeper and more persistent governance pattern- the tendency to address visible symptoms without adequate engagement with underlying causes. The decision, even after correction, appears to have been taken without sufficient preparation, research, or anticipation of its practical consequences.
Distinguishing bad intent from bad management and good intent f...
This brings the primary question into sharper focus. Is this an attempt at structural reform of Nepal’s shadow education economy, or merely a limited intervention at the school level? The answer remains unclear. That uncertainty, more than the policy itself, now defines the debate.
The courses in question are not incidental distortions. Their intention may also be really genuine to help the students. But they are embedded in a demand–supply cycle produced by the system itself. So long as schools and colleges of repute continue to conduct competitive entrance examinations, a parallel market for preparation will persist. Where competition exists, preparation follows. Until recently, institutions such as St. Xavier’s, St. Mary’s, and Budhanilakantha School conducted entrance examinations even at early grades. The predictable outcome was the proliferation of preparation classes for children as young as six. When some of these institutions shifted to lottery-based admissions a couple of years ago, demand for such classes declined sharply, almost to the point of disappearance. They persist elsewhere only because the entrance test continues in other schools.
The policy implication of this is straightforward. As long as the test remains, so will the market that feeds on it. A decision to eliminate entrance examinations and introduce a lottery-based admission system across schools, public and private alike, would dismantle this segment almost entirely. What we have instead is a symptomatic intervention. It does not address the source of the problem.
A similar logic applies to bridge courses at the higher secondary level. For students from rural public schools, these courses function less as a luxury than as an instrument of transition. A large number of SEE graduates come from these public schools, yet a huge majority moves into private colleges for Grades 11 and 12.In fact, nine out of every ten students seeking science education at this level end up in private institutions. Bridge courses thus operate as an informal equalizer, helping students adjust to disparities in curriculum, pedagogy, and language.
Their abrupt removal, without a structured alternative, risks deepening the very inequalities the policy claims to address. If they are to be eliminated, they must be replaced, ideally with a standardized, three-credit transition program embedded within Grade 11 across schools. But such a proposal needs to be accompanied by administrative capacity. The Ministry’s ability to implement a nationwide lottery-based admission system at this level remains uncertain. So too does its capacity to design and deliver a meaningful transition program across the higher secondary system. This is where the problem lies.
More importantly, the focus on entrance classes and bridge courses obscures the scale of the larger problem. The shadow economy of education in Nepal extends far beyond these visible segments. At its core lies a dense and entrenched ecosystem. There exists an entire industry thriving on guidebooks and guess papers, cheat-notes,thesis-writing services that dish out garbage, and predatory academic publishing at a sophisticated level.
Among our university students, a familiar joke captures this reality with unsettling precision: “Neema University is bigger than any of the country’s universities.” The sarcasm is instructive.Its contribution to the decay of academic discipline and honesty is immense. It further points to the dominance of materials produced by Neema Publication, whose guess papers and manuals, often authored anonymously by university teachers for extra money, function as a parallel curriculum. Available from as early as Grade 4 across subjects, these materials do not merely supplement learning. They reshape it, narrowing the idea of education and knowledge development down to annualized exam prediction and duplication.
In this context, the elimination of entrance preparation classes and bridge courses risks addressing only the surface while leaving the structural issues intact. If anything, it may strengthen other segments of the shadow economy. Publishers such as Neema stand to gain, as demand for low-cost, exam-oriented materials is likely to surge with the onset of new admissions in the Nepali New Year.
What emerges out of the newly introduced policy, then, is not reform, but displacement of the problem. Without confronting the incentives that sustain this ecosystem, from examination design to institutional accountability, policy interventions will continue to shift pressure from one informal sector to another, leaving the underlying distortion of Nepal’s education system fundamentally unchanged.This is what makes the present debate more complex than it appears.
The issue is not the existence of bridge courses or entrance preparation alone. It is the ecosystem that produces and sustains them. Any attempt to regulate or ban them, without engaging that structure, risks treating the symptom while leaving the cause intact. Dear Minister Sasmit Pokharel, look at it. We are prepared to contribute to any meaningful reform aimed at lifting the essence of learning and education in our country.
(A software engineer at Ambition Guru, the author is a Digital Governance Research Fellow at Asia Dialogue Initiative Kathmandu.)
