The continued delay in the parliamentary endorsement of the School Education Bill is emblematic of the faulty way our executive and legislative branches deal with vital national problems. Often, it all starts with one or the other group of people hitting the street, demanding a change in this or that legislation. When it’s not the medical doctors who are doing so, it’s the teachers or jewelry businesses. After this happens for some time, the government calls the protesters for talks and agrees to address some or all of their demands. But then nothing happens and the protesters again take to the street. Back in March, the chief whips of the ruling parties had pledged to pass the School Education Bill by June 29. The deadline has come and gone and there has been zero progress in its passage. The bill has some problematic provisions that were included after continued pressure from the protesting teachers, for instance those related to automatic promotion of temporary teachers to permanent positions and fewer entries of outsiders into such positions. These provisions stifle meritocracy. Yet the representatives of the ruling parties promised the bill would nonetheless be passed, pronto. Now that it hasn’t, the teachers are threatening to take to the street again.

Parliament should not be making laws under street pressure. Yet our ruling parties should also not be making promises they cannot keep. Many suspect that the reason the bill is being held up has little to do with the political parties’ concern for meritocracy and everything with their old habit of serving vested interests. Private schools, for instance, have long protested efforts to turn them into trusts. The operators of these schools want to remove all suggestions from the bill that they will ever have to do so. There may be many other vested interests who are also putting pressure on the ruling parties for the inclusion of their concerns in the bill. After all, health and education have emerged as by far the most lucrative businesses in Nepal. And so all kinds of dubious provisions related to them tend to be inserted into our laws.

On the School Education Bill in particular, the most problematic part is that all deliberations on the bill have stopped. After frequently deferring the deadline for the bill’s endorsement, Minister for Education Raghuji Pant now does not even show an interest in resuming discussions on it. At the instruction of the Nepali Congress and CPN-UML top brass, the meetings of the Education, Health and Information Technology committee of the House of Representatives, called to endorse the bill, have already been deferred thrice. This follows the postponement of its meeting called for July 6. The committee members have had it and say they will now focus on some other bill rather than endlessly wait for resumption of discussions on the School Education Bill, as important as it might be. The laws that are made through backchannel negotiations with vested interests rather than open deliberations with all concerned stakeholders cannot be expected to serve public interest. Nor will endlessly sitting on problems make them go away.