resolved in a scientific and legitimate way. They cannot be resolved

merely through a political consensus. Doing so will create unrest among the people of different castes, cultures and geographical locations.

Keeping this in view, the interim

constitution has provisioned to form

a high-level commission to recommend the overall restructuring of the states.

Accordingly, the Maoist-led government formed the commission headed

by a sociologist and geographer Dr Ganesh Man Gurung. However, the commission never got complete shape, as other political parties thought it was a unilateral move by the Maoists.

Political parties and leaders, who are doing the groundwork for the Constituent Assembly Committee for

Restructuring the State and Sharing of State Power lack apt scientific and technical knowledge. The leaders even have a tendency to look into the matter of delineating the geographical locations from their own point of view. Their logic for carving out the federal entities is based on their possible vote banks, potentiality of their political career and other vested interests. This reflects their bias in carving out the federal states.

In principle, the parties are clearly adopting federalism. The interim

constitution, which was promulgated only after forging consensus among the parties, states: "Inclusive, democratic and progressive restructuring of the state shall be done to bring about an end to discrimination based on class, caste, language, sex, culture, religion and region by eliminating the centralised and unitary form of the state."

However, the parties neither showed their readiness to form a high-level state restructuring commission, nor are they ready to narrow down their wide-ranging differences. Analysts and experts say it is almost impossible to set up the high-level commission and follow it to meet the CA deadline of promulgating the new constitution on May 28.

So they suggest that a high-level technical committee comprising non-political experts should be formed to settle the issue. Such a committee can work in a scientific way and give unbiased and more appropriate report, they claim.

Talking about the number of

states, the parties, in their initial drafts forwarded to the CA committee, have proposed three to 15 states. But none of them have backed their proposal with strong scientific logic and facts. At present, there are five development regions, 14 zones and 75 districts in Nepal as carved by the then king Mahendra in 1960s. The authorities had arrived at such a distribution after a geographical survey of the country, extending over 147,181 sq km comprising plains in the south bordering India and hills and mountains in the north along China.

Experts and scholars have advised the political parties to study international experiences, past experience of Nepal's state structure, scientific and authentic data, experts' opinions and recommendations of people to narrow down their differences. Only talking about consensus will not lead to an agreement.

The CA committee held 107 meetings and its sub-committees also tried their best to iron out the differences. The political parties also held dozens of meetings on the issue. Different non- governmental organisations also held several seminars. But the progress towards forging a consensus has been very discouraging.