Art By: Nikita Gautam

After the news of political parties agreeing on the division of the country into states, many opinions flooded in. In many places strikes broke out in disagreement with the decision to make Nepal a federal democratic country; the decision was made by the Constituent Assembly. One of the reasons was the belief that dividing Nepal into federal states will divide the country, which I do not think is completely true.

It is true that if a country is divided into federal states on the basis of social factors like cast, ethnicity, language spoken, etcetera, there is a chance that it can give rise to conflict in a country like Nepal.  Nepal has many ethnic groups, more than 120 different languages are spoken in the country. Since Nepal has such diverse features, the federal states were divided on the basis of population. It is very unlikely that it will cause conflict. This would rather encourage opportunities for the local people and proper use of local resources, which will lead to faster development of the country.

Dividing a country into smaller federal states is not dividing a country. We can look at it as dividing a big project and giving it to different teams to complete the task faster and more efficiently and effectively.

We can take the development of Nepal as one big project and federal states as teams assigned with different tasks. We will have six different states, which means six different state capitals, which means six developed cities. Each state will have at least one state university, which means six new universities.

Each state government can make their own law according to their need. This system will give power to the local government, which is closer to the general population. Decentralization, which is a key concept in development, can be very well implemented with a system of governance that has federal states.