Since the 1950s, ‘development’ has become one of the most powerful ideas shaping Nepal’s socio-political imagination and everyday life. From policy dialogues to tea-shop conversations, the language of bikas permeates how progress is understood and measured. Over the decades, the Nepali state has implemented a wide range of development plans, supported by substantial bilateral and multilateral assistance.

Yet, even by standard measures, the outcomes have been mixed. Nepal has achieved tangible gains—rising income, lower child mortality, improved literacy, better maternal health and longer life expectancy. But it continues to rank among the poorer countries in Asia despite the upcoming LDC graduation, with persistent and shifting forms of inequality. More importantly, Nepal’s development has been largely driven by people’s own efforts for survival, including millions of migrant workers who send remittances home, the role of SMEs, and contributions from agriculture. In this context, an ‘anthropology of development’ offers a nuanced perspective to understand the many complexities, contradictions and anomalies that characterise Nepal’s development.

In Nepal, roads, hydropower projects and telecommunications infrastructure symbolise modernity. In many rural areas, the arrival of a road is seen as the arrival of bikas. Yet these projects can also create land disputes and environmental impacts, and limit access to resources and benefits. Therefore, development is not only experienced as a promise, but also as something that can lead to disagreement and conflict. Perhaps, the most striking anthropological insight is that bikas is as deeply a local aspiration as it is an external imposition.

For many Nepalis, bikas represents access to education, health services, roads, connectivity, employment opportunities, global connectivity, etc. These are not trivial aspirations. They are fundamentally about dignity, security and the possibility of a viable life. At the same time, development is often associated with corruption, unfinished projects, dependency, persistent inequality and the growing disconnect between policy priorities and lived realities. The duality of bikas as both hope and disappointment defines the cultural life of development in Nepal.

The dominant way of seeing development in Nepal is essentially economic and technical. Within this frame, development means rising GDP, falling poverty rates, expanding access to services, and is expressed through the Human Development Index, SDG indicators and randomised controlled trials. Anthropologists have long argued that development must be understood not just as policy but also as a force that shapes everyday life through power, relations and experiences—different actors understand development in different ways and don’t have equal ability to shape what actually happens on the ground. Anthropological studies on Nepal have highlighted the multiple effects of development.

On one hand, Professor of Anthropology Stacy Pigg’s influential work “Inventing Social Categories Through Place: Social Representations and Development in Nepal” shows how bikas has become a powerful cultural category, transforming not only material conditions, but also reshaping identities, aspirations and social geographies of modern life. On the other hand, development projects often privilege certain groups, while marginalising others; these create bureaucratic systems driven by donor reporting, indicators and jargon, and translate complex social issues into technical problems that could be ‘solved’ through projects.

An anthropological approach does not reject the importance of economic well-being or material improvement. It simply insists that these cannot be achieved by treating development as a technical problem responsive to technical solutions alone. Anthropology highlights what development actually looks like in everyday life. It is interested in understanding how global ideas are interpreted, negotiated and sometimes resisted by local communities; how people make sense of projects meant to improve their lives; how power shapes who gets access to resources; and how the promise, as well as the failure of development, shapes people’s identities and political consciousness. For Nepal, the central question is no longer simply how to achieve bikas, but how to rethink development itself—beyond dependency, beyond technocratic fixes and towards forms of change that are grounded in people’s lived realities, more equitable in practice and meaningful in their daily lives.

Today, new forces and the new generation are reshaping ideas of development. More than being a passing moment of political anger, the recent Gen Z uprising brought to the surface long-standing questions about how bikas has fallen short of people’s expectations over the past seven decades. Similarly, Nepal is navigating multiple overlapping transitions. Federalism has given local governments more power over development, but has become a new site of contestation. Migration has become the primary source of household income, but has created gaps in family and community life. Climate change is intensifying vulnerabilities, especially for those already on the margins. Digital technology is changing how development is delivered, while also creating new divides. Across cases, the anthropological questions remain the same: Who benefits? Who decides? How do these changes affect people’s relationships, identities and everyday lives?

For development practitioners working in Nepal, the anthropological perspective does not provide ready-made solutions; rather, it offers a fundamentally different way of asking questions. In this new perspective, the most important question is not ‘what does this community need?’, but ‘what do people in the community already know; what do they already do; what do they already value; and how does our intervention engage with that reality rather than ignore it?’ Hence, the shift is from a predefined, outsider’s perspective to a more emergent insider’s perspective. This treats communities as more than just beneficiaries awaiting services—as social and political actors with their own histories, institutions, knowledge systems and claims, including ones that may challenge the assumptions

of the program itself. Therefore, we are at a critical juncture that needs to redefine and reshape Nepal’s bikas for the next decade.

As a way forward, through a series of articles, I will explore specific dimensions of Nepal’s developmental story—from the context of development, to concepts, methods, domains (youth, gender, migration, climate, markets, technology) and the people who shape development. It is an attempt to bridge critical scholarship and new development practices, and offer an honest account of what development can actually become. I will also propose a set of professional reconfigurations for development practitioners, with the hope that it translates into praxis.

This series will redefine and re-engage with different aspects of Nepal’s development. This requires us to take the social, cultural and political dimensions of people’s lives more seriously, not as mere inconvenient complications. More importantly, we must re-situate development not as an external force to be incorporated, but as something grounded in the everyday realities of local people, embedded in lived experiences and reflective of life itself at the local level.