Task Force submits report on foreign policy

Kathmandu, Feb. 8: The High-Level Foreign Policy Review Task Force submitted its report to Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba Thursday. 

Professor Sridhar K. Khatri, a member of the Task Force, presented a copy of the report to the Prime Minister. 

PM Deuba then handed over the report to Foreign Secretary Shankar Das Bairagi.

While receiving the report, the Prime Minister appreciated the job accomplished by the Task Force. The report contains various recommendations for consideration by the government with a view to improving Nepal’s conduct of foreign policy in the days to come. 

The government had constituted a 16-member High Level Task Force in April 2017 under the convenorship of the Minister for Foreign Affairs. 

It had the mandates of identifying the determining factors of Nepal’s foreign policy in the changing context, reassessing the different dimensions of foreign policy and diplomacy and its sectoral policies such as bilateral, sub-regional, regional and multilateral diplomacy, and recommending measures to strengthen the coordination and collaboration between the MoFA and other line ministries and departments. 

It also had been given the responsibility of formulating development diplomacy and find out methods for strengthening the Nepali missions abroad. 

A member of the Task Force said that the experts group had recommended short-term, mid-term and long-term foreign policy priorities to the government. 

However, he declined to comment further on the report. The MoFA also refused to comment on it.

Although the Task force was given four months to prepare the report, it submitted the report only after 10 months. 

The Task Force was formed under the coordination of then foreign minister Prakash Sharan Mahat and included former minister Bidhyadhar Mallik, diplomats Rishi Raj Adhikari, Shankar Prasad Sharma, Shambhu Ram Simkhada, trade expert Posh Raj Pandey, labour expert Ganesh Gurung, former foreign secretary Madhu Raman Acharya, former secretary and law expert Mohan Banjade, and security experts Pawan Bahadur Pandey and Deepak Prakash Bhatta.  

Likewise, foreign affairs experts Shreedhar K. Khatri and Nischal Nath Pandey, representative of the Nepal Council of World Affairs Rajendra Bahadur Shrestha and Deputy Executive Director of the Institute of Foreign Affairs Indra Kumari Adhikari were other members of the group. 

Foreign Secretary Bairagi was the member secretary of the Task Force. 

Published in The Rising Nepal on 9 February 2018.