5.6 Planned Development in Nepal

The frame: from 1956, Nepal adopted development planning — the First Five-Year Plan (1956–61) onwards, steered by the National Planning Commission — plans now running to the Fifteenth ("Prosperous Nepal, Happy Nepali") and Sixteenth (2024–) Plans, alongside periodic plans and SDGs; since 2015, planning itself is federal (three tiers — see Unit 7.5).The arc (learn as four eras):1. 1956–1960: foundations — surveys, trunk infrastructure, the administrative state itself.2. Panchayat decades (1960–1990): state-led consolidation — land reform rhetoric (Land Act 2021 BS/1964), birta abolition earlier, education and health expansion, aid-dependence institutionalised; "development without participation."3. Liberalization (1990–2006): the open economy, the first growth of NGOs/INGOs and a remittance boom — amid armed conflict; development's exclusion map (hill/upper-caste bias) became a war map.4. Inclusive-federal era (2006–): rights-based plans, inclusion targets, SDGs, local-level planning since 2017.The balance-sheet (write both columns — the syllabus rewards balance):• Achievements: life expectancy up to around seventy years; adult literacy to roughly three- quarters (2021 census); massive declines in absolute poverty; near-universal school enrolment at basic level; road, electricity and telecom reach; the human-development climb from the low to the medium band.• The standing critiques: the implementation gap (plan rhetoric vs delivery); remittancedependence (around a quarter of GDP — prosperity imported, productive investment thin); aid dependence and donor-shaped agendas; centralism's afterlife (Kathmandu-first growth even under federalism); exclusion's persistence (Dalit,…