Two years ago, while returning to Canada, I met several young Nepali girls in the Dubai airport lounge, all headed to Canada for undergraduate studies. They told me that after finishing Grade XII they apply to nine or ten countries. If none accepts them, they feel depressed — as if failing to escape Nepal means failing in life. These were private-school graduates.
In a village, I met a bright boy from a poor family waiting for his Grade X results; he said he was already seeking loans to go to the Middle East for manual labor. “Even if I pass, I won’t rank highly — that is the fate of public-school graduates — and I can’t afford a good private school. So I’m preparing to leave,” he told me. Nearby, a woman in her forties said farming was no longer viable and she was waiting for her visa to join her son — a medical doctor.
Talk to anyone, of any age and background, and you hear the same urgency: everyone is trying to get out. Villages are empty, public schools are hollow,and fields lie abandoned. Nepalis are not simply leaving; they are running. And you cannot help but wonder: what happened to this nation?
I began school sitting under a tree — no classroom, no blackboard. Yet every child of my generation carried the same dream: study hard and build a meaningful life in Nepal. It was a poor and politically suppressive era, but rich in hope. Our dreams were rooted in Nepal’s soil. Even when we went abroad, it was only to gain skills and return with knowledge to build the nation.
Today, the dream has reversed. Students study hard, but only so they can leave. The habit of working hard to build the nation has turned into working hard to get out of it.
Run
Watching Nepal’s exodus feels like witnessing a slow-motion train wreck — one where you can neither stop the crash nor escape its impact. You see the danger coming, yet seem powerless to change course. A country can fix bad policies, but it cannot recover once its people have left.
Bleeding people and potential
Nepalis are not leaving because they lack talent or ambition; they are leaving because the country refuses to reward either. Nepal’s politics suffocates initiative, its institutions repel competence, and its economy fails to create jobs. Youth have little choice but to look abroad. Public schools barely teach, universities are captured by politics, and vocational training — the backbone of jobs — remains neglected. As a result, even educated youth end up in unskilled Gulf labor and return later with no skills to rebuild their lives at home.
The scale of exodus is staggering. In 2024, out of roughly 21 million people of working age, only 8.5 million were in the labour force at home (those working or actively seeking work; students are not counted). Another 4.3 million — more than half the size of Nepal’s domestic labour force — were working abroad. This excludes the vast, unrecorded flow to India and those who have emigrated permanently. Counting everyone, a reasonable estimate is that around six million Nepalis now live outside the country. Last year alone, 840,000 left for foreign employment — an average of 2,300 departures every single day (not including those going to India, emigrants, or students). This is not ordinary migration; this is a demographic outflow of historic proportions.
The student exodus is no less alarming. Last year, 113,000 Nepali students went abroad for higher study — 128 percent of the total number of university graduates Nepal produced across all levels. And this does not include those who left on foreign scholarships or the thousands who go to India on self-finance. The money they carried as an exchange facility alone — NRs 125 billion — was staggering: nearly one-third of Nepal’s total export earnings, more than double what tourists spent that year, and 61 percent of the combined education budget of all three tiers of government.
This is not migration; this is national depletion. No country loses so many of its young people and so much of its hard-earned foreign currency. Nepal is being emptied of its talent and its money at the same time. This talent exodus is a referendum on the Nepali state — a powerful protest of a generation choosing dignity over decay and possibility over peril. It is the country’s most honest form of dissent: a vote cast not at ballot boxes, but at airport terminals.
Nepal’s political class recognizes this exodus as a safety valve: a restless youth population at home could challenge their corruption, but scattered abroad poses no threat. They mock Chandra Shumsher’s fear when he said, ‘I have struck an axe on my own leg’ while opening Nepal’s first university — yet they have quietly absorbed his logic into their political soul.
At a time when Chinese and Indians are working on cutting-edge technologies that will shape the future, Nepalis line up outside passport offices for manual jobs in the Middle East. While our neighbors debate artificial intelligence and space exploration, our youth negotiate recruitment agents, loan sharks, and one-way tickets to Gulf labor camps. The contrast is heartbreaking. They are not running toward foreign greenery; they are fleeing the barren ground Nepal has become.
Rebuilding the foundations of hope
How do we turn it around? Nepal is not doomed. But cosmetic reforms and new slogans will not slow, let alone reverse, this exodus. The only way forward is to restore hope to people who have been deprived of it — a task that demands continuous, bold, and relentless policy effort. I do not hold a magic wand, and no simple list can fix a crisis of this scale. In a country where those in power rarely listen, proposing reforms seems futile. But ideas and knowledge still matter to those willing to act. With that spirit, let me outline the basic foundations of hope.
If we listen carefully, the stories of those leaving Nepal already point to the reforms the country needs. The village boy shows why public schools must turn from centers of despair into places of real learning. The private-school girls remind us that universities must be strengthened so the talented do not have to leave. The young men heading for Gulf show why job creation must be the first priority. The woman joining her doctor son abroad reveals how urgently Nepal must retain professionals. Empty villages and idle fields show why agriculture must be revived and opportunity spread beyond Kathmandu. And the everyday experience of dealing with government offices shows why corruption must end. The millions of Nepalis abroad, often the very people in these stories, must be engaged not as outsiders but as partners. They do not need dual citizenship, only a country humble enough to use their skills.
Nepal is a country of leavers today, but it must not become a country of quitters. They are not leaving because they quit; they are leaving because the country quit on them. Nepal will not be saved by remittances, but by becoming a place that inspires its young, values their knowledge, and welcomes them back with hope.
(The author holds a PhD in Economics, and writes on economic issues in Nepal and Canada. He can be reached at acharya.ramc@gmail.com)
