Step in right direction

Education and Sports Minister Pradip Nepal has announced that Tribhuvan University’s Proficiency Certificate Level (PCL) will be scrapped and the responsibility of managing school education up to class 12 will be transferred to the Higher Secondary Education Board (HSEB). This is a positive move and will help bring Nepal’s education system in line with international standards. But as your editorial “Needs of education” (THT, May 11) made clear there needs to be adequate homework before the implementation of this decision.

Higher secondary education must be made affordable for the poor and underprivileged students. For this, I recommend that the HSEB operate under the aegis of the Ministry of

Education and Sports in order to provide it with necessary financial help.

Decisions should not be made only to gain cheap popularity. Instead, there should be thorough homework before making such important decisions so as to avoid possible troubles in the future.

Rajesh Bhandari, Angna-4, Panchthar

Dirty air

Apropos of the news report “City air quality reports are just hot air!” (THT, May 14), it is sad that Nepal continues to employ old standards to measure air pollution level. It is still not too late to upgrade our standards and help citizens get the right information about the level of air pollution. Successive reports have indicated that Kathmandu’s environment is degrading but there is no concrete action plan to control it as yet.

Samridhi Shrestha, Arizona State University, USA

Skybridges

A number of skybridges have been built in the capital for the safety of pedestrians. But few people bother to cross the roads through these bridges. This, in turn, has resulted in many accidents. Unless Nepalis learn to do these basic things, there will be no meaningful change in the country. And what better way to bring about social change than by changing ourselves first?

Ratan Ale, Sanepa

Oversensitive

This is in reference to your news report “China to other countries: Keep off Dalai” (THT, May 11). We the Tibetans are hugely disappointed to learn that the Dalai Lama has cancelled his Belgium visit. It is hard to understand Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jaing Yu’s remarks on the Dalai Lama. In 1979, Deng Xiaoping proposed that except independence, all other issues regarding Tibet could be negotiatited. In this context, the Dalai Lama has proposed a middle way to solve the Tibetan issue.

But some months back, another prominent Chinese communist leader said that the Dalai Lama was seeking a “Greater Tibet” through his middle way. This is not true. The reason behind his proposal is to have genuine national regional autonomy for all Tibetans so as to achieve genuine equality and unity between the Tibetans and Chinese. If the Chinese authorities are really sincere about solving the Tibet issue, they must not misinterpret the Dalai Lama. His foreign visits, which are mostly for spiritual purposes, have been greeted with deep suspicion and criticism from Beijing. Chinese pressure on Belgium to cancel the Dalai Lama’s visit shows how seriously they take the influence of the Dalai Lama.

Nyima Gyalpo, Kathmandu