Once a Nepali, always a Nepali—the NRN bill draft begs to differ

Turning away a community of nearly 140,000 Nepali-Bhutanese diaspora is a missed opportunity.

Last month, the Ministry of Finance released Nepal’s Current Economic Situation Report 2083 , a hard-hitting macroeconomic diagnosis concluding that Nepal’s economy is crippled by crony capitalism, policy corruption and weak governance. With the ambition of becoming a $100 billion economy within the next few years—currently standing at $49 billion, crawling at 3.5 percent growth and attracting a mere 0.2 percent in FDI—it is high time Nepal looked beyond its borders and learned from the economic transformation that Deng Xiaoping architected in China, with the help of the Chinese Diaspora. The preferential tax rates, special economic zones, simplified licensing and diaspora-friendly legal frameworks resulted in overseas Chinese contributing over 67 percent of China’s total FDI.