A reflection for citizens, counselors, and policymakers who are still asking the wrong question.
Every week, I sit across from young people in my counseling office. Motivated, curious, full of ideas. And almost every conversation ends at the same place.
"I want to go abroad."
I don't blame them. I understand the logic. And honestly, as someone who works in this field and studies economics at the same time, I have spent a lot of time thinking about why that sentence keeps repeating itself — in every district, every family, every generation.
What I have come to believe is this: we are asking the wrong question.
We keep asking — why are our young people leaving?
The real question is — why is the system here not giving them a reason to stay?
The Physics of Human Behavior
There is a concept in physics that I keep thinking about when I look at the migration data.
If you take water — ordinary water, no special properties — and you push it through a narrow high-pressure pipe, it comes out like a jet stream. Powerful, fast, disciplined. Not because of anything special in the water. Because of the pipe.
Australia, Japan, the Gulf — these countries are that pipe.
A young Nepali who spent years sleeping late, avoiding responsibilities, and never once showing any particular drive will land in Melbourne and suddenly wake up at 4:00 AM in the winter cold to catch a bus to a cleaning shift. They will work double shifts. They will count every dollar. They will develop a routine that would impress any life coach.
This is not a personality transformation. This is not a moral awakening.
This is what happens when a system is designed in a way that makes discipline the only option for survival.
The pressure of multi-million rupee debt, weekly rent, visa conditions, and the fear of failure in front of everyone back home — this pressure is the pipe. And our young people are the water.
The system abroad automates their hardwork.
One thing we often misunderstand about motivation is that human beings rarely respond to speeches or slogans alone. They respond to systems. More specifically, they respond to visible and predictable relationships between effort and outcome.
In many developed economies, the connection is clear: work leads to income, skill leads to opportunity, discipline leads to stability. The system may not always be fair, but it is often structured enough that people can see a direct relationship between what they do today and what their life looks like tomorrow. That predictability changes behavior.
In Nepal, however, that relationship often feels uncertain. Many young people grow up watching equally talented individuals succeed not through innovation, productivity, or skill, but through political access, family connections, bureaucracy, or migration itself. When systems stop rewarding effort consistently, motivation weakens — not because people lack ambition, but because institutions fail to convert effort into progress. People work hardest when hard work appears meaningful.
The Question Nepal's Policymakers Are Not Asking
Here is what I find deeply troubling as an economics student and as someone who counsels students daily.
Nepal has nearly 62% of its population in the working-age bracket — one of the most significant demographic windows in our country's history. Demographers have said this window will stay open for the next 40 to 60 years. We are sitting on what economists call a demographic dividend — a rare historical moment when a country's working-age population is large enough to drive explosive economic growth, if the conditions are right.
But the conditions are not right.
And the question policymakers should be asking — seriously, urgently, not in white papers that nobody reads — is this:
If the same Nepali young person who seems unmotivated here becomes a disciplined, hardworking contributor the moment they land in another country's system — what does that tell us about our system?
It tells us that the potential was always there.
The hardwork was always there.
The energy was always there.
We just never built the pipe.
What the System Abroad Actually Does — and Why We Misread It
When a Nepali student comes back from Australia for vacation and posts photos with a new phone, a city skyline, a coffee shop in the background — we read it as success. Families celebrate. Younger siblings feel inspired. The narrative is: "Go abroad, work hard, come back transformed."
But let me tell you what the photo doesn't show.
Behind that photo is often: a shared room with four other Nepali students, a debt of Rs. 30 to 50 lakh already taken from the family or through a loan, a university education that is secondary to the 20 hours a week of cleaning or delivery work that pays the rent, and a daily psychological burden that nobody talks about openly because admitting struggle means admitting the dream was wrong.
The system abroad forces hardwork. But it forces it into the lowest-value, most physically exhausting, least-skill-building work available — because that is what the foreign labor market needs our people for.
Nearly 700,000 Nepalis leave the country every year for foreign employment. Their remittances now account for roughly 25 to 26 percent of our GDP. We have built our national budget on the exhaustion of our own youth.
That is not a success story. That is a structural dependency that we have dressed up as one.
At the same time, this failure did not emerge overnight, nor can it be explained simply by blaming individuals in government. Nepal's economic structure has been shaped by decades of political instability, weak industrial growth, fragmented planning, policy inconsistency, and increasing dependence on remittance inflows. Over time, exporting labor became easier than building industries capable of absorbing that labor domestically.
And because remittance continued stabilizing the economy, the urgency to build productive systems inside the country weakened. In many ways, migration solved immediate economic pressure while quietly delaying deeper structural reform. The result is an economy where leaving often appears more rational than building.
The Hidden Advantage We Keep Ignoring
Now here is where I want to speak directly to policymakers, educators, and anyone who influences how young people think about their future.
The person who stays in Nepal — if the right system exists — has a structural advantage that we have almost entirely failed to recognize.
The cost of living in Nepal is still low enough that a person earning even a modest income in foreign currency through remote work can live well, invest in themselves, and build something real. They don't need to spend 80% of their income on rent alone. They don't need to trade their most productive hours for minimum wage in a foreign country's labor market. They are not under a visa deadline that turns every month into a survival race.
If that same pressure-tested, naturally capable young person — the one who would wake up at 4 AM in Melbourne — were given the right environment here, the right skill, the right market access, the right infrastructure, the right policy support — they could build wealth here. Real, compounding, asset-building wealth.
Not survival. Wealth.
But we are not building that system. And that is not an accident of culture or individual laziness. It is a policy failure. A systemic failure. And it is one we keep ignoring because the remittances keep coming in and the macroeconomic numbers look stable on paper.
What a System That Unlocks Potential Actually Looks Like
Let me be specific, because I think this conversation often stays too abstract and never reaches the level of actual policy action.
A system that keeps hardworking young people in Nepal and gives them a reason to build here would need to do at least the following things — and honestly, none of them are impossible.
First, it needs to create real economic pressure with real rewards attached. Not the pressure of debt and survival, but the pressure of meaningful goals — startup funding access, digital infrastructure, a market that actually absorbs local talent. When people can see a credible path from effort to outcome inside Nepal, the motivational gap disappears. People work hard when working hard leads somewhere.
Second, it needs to invest seriously in the skills that allow Nepali youth to earn globally while living locally. Software development, data analysis, UI/UX design, digital marketing, content creation, online freelancing — these are not luxury skills. They are the skills that allow a young person in Bharatpur or Butwal to earn in dollars and live in rupees. That is a purchasing power reality that should be at the center of our skills policy, not a footnote.
Third, it needs to stop treating technical and vocational education as a second-class option. The CTEVT and programs like the QualiTY project are steps in the right direction, but the scale and the market-linkage are still not there. We are training people for skills without building the market conditions that reward those skills inside Nepal.
Fourth, the government needs to build the kind of physical and digital infrastructure that makes working from Nepal genuinely competitive — reliable electricity, affordable internet, co-working spaces in secondary cities, and a financial system that makes receiving international payments easy and legally simple. Right now, a freelancer in Chitwan faces more bureaucratic friction collecting a $500 payment from a foreign client than a factory worker in Qatar faces sending the same amount home.
The Uncomfortable Truth
I want to say something that is uncomfortable but I believe is true.
Nepal is not poor in talent. We are not poor in ambition. We are not even poor in hardwork — the evidence of our people's capacity to work hard is visible in every country they migrate to.
We are poor in system design.
We have spent decades watching our people go abroad, work their hardest years in other countries' economies, send money back home, and call that development. And in one sense it has kept us going. But in a deeper sense, it has allowed us to avoid building the actual engine. We have been running on the battery while never charging it.
The demographic window we have right now — these 40 to 60 years — is not guaranteed to produce growth. It only produces growth if the working-age population works on things that build compounding value inside the country. Right now, most of our working-age people are either underemployed here or working in low-skill jobs abroad. Both situations waste the dividend.
Every year we delay building the right system is a year of demographic dividend we cannot recover.
A Direct Message to Those Who Make Policy
If you are in a position to influence how this country invests its public resources — in education, in infrastructure, in economic policy, in youth development — I want to ask you one question.
If the exact same young Nepali who seems "lazy" at home becomes a disciplined, high-functioning worker the moment another country's system takes over — what are you waiting for?
The energy exists. The raw human capital exists. Even the ambition exists — it is just being exported because we have not built a home for it.
Build the pipe.
Not the pipe that forces people to survive. The pipe that gives people a genuine reason to build, to stay, to invest their best years into the country that raised them.
That is not idealism. That is economics.
And if we don't start taking it seriously, the demographic dividend that every economist says we are sitting on will simply become somebody else's GDP.
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