When other vital requisites are lacking, no trust fund or any other approach could make the difference between success and failure The main criticisms of the performance of the government in carrying out its development programmes are many, including its low spending capacity, official corruption, the lack of a high sense of responsibility and the lack of an effective system of rewarding the good workers and punishing the bad ones. The list of shortcomings can be multiplied. These can be applied to all development programmes in general. It is not that the government does not come up with wide ideas; it does saying that these ideas will improve its development performance. Take the yearly National Budget which sets aside budgets for all development projects and programmes. Almost every year the Finance Minister presents one or more ideas that had not been introduced in earlier budget speeches, though almost certainly borrowed from outside. One such idea is the creation of a trust fund or basket fund for the financing of development programmes to be implemented under the Ministry of Agriculture Development (MoAD). Under this, the development partners are expected to put their assistance into this fund and the government is also to put its counterpart contribution there. Under MoAD, the fund will be mobilized in priority areas where government intervention is to be made to achieve robust agricultural growth. The government believes that such fund will prevent the haphazard mobilization of the donors’ assistance because the government will design the projects and programmes and select the project areas, together with the development partners. The government expects this process to avoid duplication of programmes. The Agriculture Development Strategy (ADS), which is a 20-year vision document with a 10-year action plan, envisages this trust fund, and MoAD is reported now to be preparing to establish this fund. After the creation of the trust fund, all development expenditure is to be made out of this fund. Examples of the use of trust fund can be seen in School Sector Reform Programme and Nepal Health Sector Programme. It is good to come up with ideas like setting up a trust fund to improve the implementation of projects and programmes. And there should be a constant search for better ways of improving the performance of development projects and programmes. But the main problems of poor development performance of the government lie elsewhere, such as in the factors mentioned above. Better approaches to designing and implementing projects and programmes will certainly help. But when other vital requisites are lacking, no trust fund or any other approach could make the difference between success and failure. The government has been designing and implementing development programmes and projects for the past six decades. They could not come up with effective answers to poor project implementation. The government leaders and bureaucrats have always escaped by blaming factors other than themselves. General problems like lack of coordination and duplication of work are cited to cover up their own weaknesses. If the government leaders and bureaucrats can change themselves for the better, even without the creation of a basket fund, projects and programmes can be implemented well. But that said, however, some new and better-looking approaches should also be adopted. School merger As many as 13 public schools in Kaski district are all set to be merged for want of minimum number of students. Seven other public schools have also been degraded from grade 1-5 to grade 1-3 due to lack of students in those schools mainly located in rural areas. The District Education Committee (DEC) decided to merge these schools with other nearby schools where the number of students is more. The DEC has also decided to transfer teachers from schools with less number of students to other schools having larger number of students. The property of the closed schools will be handed over to those having enough number of students. The government has injected billions of rupees to ensure cent percent enrollment of children at the primary, lower and secondary level of education. But the number of students in public schools has been declining every year even in rural areas. Parents do not want their children to be enrolled in public schools due to poor quality of education.