The Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP) has earned a historic mandate to deliver on economic prosperity and good governance for the next five years. In their manifesto, they express a firm commitment to economic growth that embodies social justice and equitable progress. Welfare policies across education, health, social protection, labour market and housing will have an important role in ensuring equity within this growth framework. However, a closer look at the manifesto reveals that the proposals are not as clear and specific as measures directed at ensuring a well-functioning competitive market. While the economic side of the manifesto methodically identifies bottlenecks, lays out concrete mechanisms to unlock growth and defines the roles key actors will play in enabling that growth, the welfare proposals are largely directional and lack the equivalent diagnostic rigour.

If RSP’s welfare orientation is limited to principles, the economic reforms may not automatically ‘trickle down’ to correct structural inequalities stemming from caste, gender, ethnicity, geography and socio-economic conditions. This is a real risk given the manifesto’s almost exclusive emphasis on citizens as economic actors, rather than right-holders with vulnerabilities.

Take poverty, for instance. Nepal has made strong progress in poverty reduction over the last few decades. Much of this gain is attributed to migration and inflow of remittances, which have been transformative in reducing poverty. However, these gains remain structurally fragile without corresponding improvements in the domestic labour market. Similarly, as of 2025, over 20 percent of Nepal’s population is multidimensionally poor, experiencing overlapping deprivations across health, education and living standards, and an additional 20 percent are vulnerable to multidimensional poverty, prone to economic and climate shocks.

Poverty reduction has also remained uneven, with significant rural-urban disparities and provincial variation. For example, in Sudurpaschim and Karnali, poverty levels exceed the national average. The Nepal Living Standards Survey (NLSS) 2024 further highlights Nepal’s uneven growth. Over the past decades, the per capita income of the richest quintile in Nepal rose to over Rs250,000 from Rs19,325, while for the poorest quintile increased to just over Rs60,000 from Rs2,020. Without welfare sector reforms grounded in a clear diagnosis of where previous efforts have fallen short, RSP’s growth agenda risks benefiting those already well-positioned to gain and bypassing those it promises to include, further entrenching structural inequalities in Nepali society.

The promise of Nepal’s economic prosperity in RSP’s manifesto is alluring. The assortment of proposals contains everything—digitalisation of government services, repealing obstructive laws and procedures to enable markets, establishing one-window system to facilitate foreign investments, creating diaspora investment fund, bringing accountability and efficiency to national pride projects, introducing digital nomad visas and investments to develop new tourism destinations, strengthening export-orientation of IT sector as a strategic industry, exploring possibilities of crypto-mining and data centres, enhancing agro-processing capacity, ramping up hydropower production—all of which should culminate in 1.2 million new jobs within the next five years. Importantly, the challenges to economic prosperity have been identified in the manifesto, and the government’s role in enabling the private sector is clearly mapped.

Compared to the economic agenda, the welfare proposals largely repeat existing approaches, particularly in areas most relevant to low-income and marginalised groups. This is evident in education and social protection, which receive one of the highest budget allocations among key welfare sectors. The RSP proposes a significant increase in investments over the next 20 years to improve quality, access and competitiveness. This is important from an equity standpoint, given that 66.2 percent of students currently study in community or government-funded public schools in Nepal.

However, successive governments have also pledged to increase investments, with Nepal’s global commitment in 2018 to ramp up education sector investment to 20 percent of the budget. Up until last fiscal year, however, the education sector received only 10.94 percent budget. Much of the local-level allocation was absorbed by teacher salaries. This constrained improvements on persistent challenges such as poor learning outcomes and school retention and completion beyond secondary level, which evidence suggests are increasingly more pressing for students, but are not adequately emphasised in the RSP’s proposal.

These challenges are compounded by capacity and governance issues at the local level, including weak coordination, resource inefficiencies and politicisation. The Education Bill seeks to address these concerns by strengthening the mandate of the local governments. However, beyond the RSP’s flagship proposal to depoliticise educational institutions, how it plans to engage with and enable local governments or to streamline existing initiatives remains unclear. Their proposal to establish one model school in each province, for example, raises questions about alignment with existing investments to establish 1,000 model schools, at least one in each municipality.

The party’s manifesto hints at a more substantive shift in social protection. It proposes a redesign of Nepal’s social protection system, which is notable given that social protection reforms have rarely been presented as a standalone political commitment in Nepal. It proposes to make social protection ‘effective, transparent and targeted’ through a centralised database to enable beneficiary identification and prioritisation of needs. This, in fact, is already underway for beneficiary identification with the mandatory requirement of the National Identity Card (NID). This has largely been driven by mounting fiscal pressures from social security allowances.

Similarly, our experience during the Covid-19 pandemic also underscored that social protection delivery systems need to be strengthened, so they can be effectively leveraged to provide income and necessary support during periods of shocks. Still, we need to learn from our past experiences that implementing large-scale reforms requires a deep understanding of delivery challenges and necessary preparations before they are launched. The government, for example, implemented a mandatory requirement of NID in 2024 to access social security allowances, in an effort to prevent duplication and leakage. But it had to reverse its decision after the Supreme Court temporarily halted the requirement, as senior citizens and people with disabilities faced difficulties in acquiring the NID. This prevented them from accessing their rightful allowances on time. RSP’s manifesto does not engage with such institutional and administrative constraints that have historically shaped Nepal’s welfare delivery. Social security allowance recipients continue to face similar challenges with NID. Going forward, it must clarify how such reforms will be managed without undermining equity and access.

The issue of prioritisation of needs, however, is different from that of identification. Nepal’s Social Security Act has already prioritised eligible categories entitled to receive allowances according to constitutional provisions. Although the RSP’s manifesto mentions its commitment to universalism elsewhere, it is not clearly reconciled with its proposal on social protection. Could this then mean a shift to introducing a more discretionary notion of ‘deservedness’, departing from Nepal’s rights-based approach? In contexts where local governance capacity remains highly uneven, introducing targeted approaches is likely to bring formidable challenges, including political interference in selection and enrolment processes, potential exclusion of eligible beneficiaries, and high administrative burden of implementing such programmes, to name a few.

Both examples point to a critical gap the RSP’s manifesto leaves unaddressed: The role of local governments in administering and delivering welfare. In the end, welfare reforms are heavily dependent on how local governments manage schools, strengthen educational quality and outcomes, implement social protection programmes, administer payments and coordinate the social service workforce. Proposed governance reforms, such as digitalisation or depoliticisation, while critical, are unlikely to resolve entrenched capacity and delivery constraints within local governance structures. Without strengthening local government to ultimately carry the weight of proposed reforms, they risk remaining on paper.