“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us … in short, the period was so far like the present period….for good or for evil…
What Charles Dickens wrote in his famous novel The Tale of Two Cities rings true for today’s Nepal. In a cycle of prolonged political instability and despair, there are signs of hope. Despite political instability and pervasive gloom surrounding it, Nepal has made impressive progress towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals. According to a recent MDG report, Nepal is likely to actually achieve some of these goals by 2015. This is definitely a sign of hope for the country. From the health sector to education, drinking water supply and roads, there are positive aspects we can count on as progress towards the ultimate: the poverty reduction. At a time when every Ram, Shyam, Sita and Gita are expressing anger and frustration over the pointless political circus of the last three plus years, the recently released Millennium Development Goals Needs Assessment for Nepal 2010 report challenges the ‘nothing happens here’ notion. However, like all his three predecessors, new prime minister Dr. Baburam Bhattarai has also failed to inject a sense of hope for a more stable politics in the minds of the people. Nepal has experimented with a variety of dispensations. All these systems and governments engaged in the rhetoric to bring good results for the nation and the people until the hard reality dawned on them that they could actually do nothing. If all previous experiments failed, how can Dr. Bhattarai be the exception? So, instead of writing about the known political game of despair, we decided to focus on hope, giving Nepal’s achievements a major coverage for this issue.
Keshab Poudel
Editor