The educational standard between the private and public schools in Nepal has not been at par considering the teaching learning environment. There is a clear disparity in education between them which has been a huge concern of parents and the cause of headache for the policy makers and implementers. The government’s effort to improve the teaching learning environment in its public schools has not been effective and productive in comparison to its billions of rupees investment for a number of known and unknown reasons. The poor results of the public schools during the Secondary School Examinations are the indicators of their educational performances.

Now, the country is going to embrace the federal structure as envisaged in the Constitution following the completion of three tiers of elections. Considering this, the government had formed a High Level Education Commission on September 4 giving it the mandate to study and make a master plan to bring about educational reforms and improvements in the structures of educational institutions in the provinces. This commission has recommended several suggestions to minimize the educational disparity between the private and public institutions at the local, provincial and federal levels.

Among its suggestions, one was to give the local governments a complete authority to fix the fee structure of educational institutions.

Rai Biren Bangdel, Maharajgunj

Woefully slow

The full page advertisement by the National Reconstruction Authority (THT December 27, Page 5) includes very positive assessments by the Prime Minister, the new CEO of the NRA and the Secretary of the NRA regarding the progress of reconstruction by the NRA following the 2015 earthquakes. But the figures provided below in the notice do not bear out their complacency about past progress and optimism about the future. The whole approach of providing compensation in tranches has proved misguided, while the actual implementation has been woefully slow.

Bureaucratic procedures, lack of co-ordination, failure to recognise in advance the difficulty of finding sufficient manpower for reconstruction given the absence of so many men abroad, the lack of training of sufficient masons and builders, and plain corruption, have all  contributed to the poor performance of the NRA. Even now, some two and a half years after the ‘quakes, fewer than 30,000 households have received all three tranches, out of some 680,000 with  signed agreements for compensation; which means that some 650,000 homes remain incomplete under the scheme. Reconstruction outside the scheme has resulted in some 80,000 houses reconstructed, according to the figures provided.

Dr David Seddon, Pakhnajol