Controversies about Indian movies aside, what Mayor of Kathmandu Balen Shah and the whole metropolitan government of the national capital did in relation to public education and public health is commendable. I am referring to the actions taken to force, on the one hand, private schools and colleges and, on the other hand, private hospitals to disclose information about the mandatory 10 per cent scholarships and free of charge care that they must respectively provide for the most vulnerable sections of the society.

This quota actually, in the context of the constitution that guarantees the right to education and health care, is trivial and yet essential. Trivial because, for a nation that will soon leave the category of least developed nations, it should have a much stronger public education and health system in place.

At the same time, provided that both private schools and hospitals will keep honouring the obligatory regulations to make their institutions more inclusive, equitable and ultimately more accessible, the quota is essential because it can be the beginning of a real change in the way key public services are administered.

What Nepal should aspire for is a real public system where persons should have, in most cases, free or certainly subsidised public education and health services.

The role of the private sector is of outmost importance in achieving this aim, and that's why private operators should be encouraged to rethink their overall mission. The private sector working in two core areas of human development like education and health should not be operating through the lens of profit making only. Instead they should see themselves as social businesses with a clear mission to develop and uplift the national human development of the nation.

Think about it: shareholders of private hospitals and schools and colleges have an outstanding role and responsibilities to create the conditions for Nepal to really become a middle income economy. Can you think about a more exciting mission? I personally can't, and if I were one of them, I would certainly think about the bottom line, but I would also embrace a much bigger ambition: transform the nation.

Obviously, the state at all levels must recognise this responsibility and also facilitate and support the transformation of for-profit private entities towards non-state social economy actors pursuing both reasonable profits but also the common good. Tax incentives and one stop hassles-free service centres to deal with their paper works could be institutionalised in order to make it easier for such institutions to pursue their mission.

Here the governments, both national and local, have an important role to harness and facilitate this transformational change.

Yet at the same time, it would be unfair to expect more from the private sector without revamping both the national education and health systems.

On the latter, the government in power at the federal level should have provided resources to fulfil the pledge made by former Prime Minister Oli to build hundreds of hospitals and health care centers across the nation.

Unfortunately, the recently presented budget is scaling back on health care.

For example, one of the best tools to achieve equity in the health sector is the national health insurance.

Instead what is happening is not only a patchy implementation of this mechanism but also a scaling back on it by many health institutions for lack of resources.

In relation to public education, more resources must be provided to local schools, but this can only come with higher accountability standards. Principals of public community schools should be seen as true educational executives on the ground, and teachers should be motivated to excel and give their best even through awards.

I am personally fine with the experimentation being undertaken in the Kathmandu Valley with textbook-free Fridays. In principle, public schools, the ones run by School Management Committees and are under the jurisdiction of the local governments, should equally provide tools to their students to dream to become whatever they want to be. Instead, students in such schools are often destined to become second class citizens, the ones who might need to learn vocational skills because, by default, they cannot become doctors or lawyers or engineers or architects.

We need to acknowledge that most of the children attending these schools come from extremely vulnerable backgrounds and they are the ones who actually need more help and support.

Scholarships can be a game-changer tool, and that's why Mayor Shah and his team should step up the game in this area. I am talking about not only more resources but also about the need to have more data on how public, community schools are doing with the resources supposedly aimed for such scholarships.

If more disclosures from the private sector are indeed welcome, the same is warranted from the public community schools. The problem is that oftentimes schools are so overstretched that they are forced to use part of the scholarship money for other important works. In other cases, the amounts given are so small that they actually are not bringing any improvements in the lives of the beneficiaries.

The key question now onwards should be the following for both health and education sectors: what are the steps that the state at all its levels and the private sector must undertake to create equity in promoting human development? Only partnerships, outcomes of ongoing dialogue among the stakeholders, can bring results. But it is also about resolution and the determination to implement whatever provision is in place, like Mayor Shah has done.

A suggestion that probably the KMC is already thinking about: an online system that allows vulnerable families to apply for scholarships and free care beds.

A version of this article appears in the print on July 3, 2023, of The Himalayan Times.