Where we were. Where we are.
Where this is going.

जन्मको जीवन प्रत्याशा

A Nepali born in 1950 could expect 34 years. A child born today can expect over 70, a doubling in one human lifetime, driven by vaccination, primary health posts, safe motherhood programmes and community health volunteers. This is the single strongest fact against "nothing was ever done".

Trend of the last decade extended; UN medium projections land in the same range.

साक्षरता दर

In 1952, one Nepali in twenty could read; among women, one in a hundred. Today it is three in four overall and above nine in ten for the young. Every census since the first has moved this number up, under every regime, through war and blockade. The remaining gap is concentrated among older adults and will close by demography alone.

Capped near saturation, youth literacy is already above 90%, so the ceiling arrives with generational turnover.

बाल मृत्युदर

In 1990, one Nepali child in seven died before their fifth birthday. Today it is one in thirty, an 80% fall in three decades, among the fastest declines recorded anywhere. Nepal met its child-mortality Millennium Development Goal early. The village health volunteer network, 50,000 women, mostly unpaid, did much of this.

Floored at 8, the mechanical trend goes below zero, which is how fast this has actually been falling.

मातृ मृत्युदर

Childbirth killed nine Nepali women in a thousand in 1990. The 2021 census measured 151 per hundred thousand, a fall of more than 80%, earned by birthing centres, the aama (free delivery) programme and roads that made hospitals reachable. Still triple the level of Sri Lanka: the journey is real, and unfinished.

Floored at 30; sustaining the current pace requires the safe-motherhood system to keep its funding.

गरिबी दर

Two Nepalis in five were poor in 1996, at the war's start. One in five is today. The uncomfortable half of the story: remittances from Nepalis working abroad drove much of the decline, the country exported its unemployment. Poverty fell; the domestic economy that should have replaced it is still being built.

Mechanical trend; the honest asterisk is that much of the fall was bought with remittances, not domestic jobs.

विद्युत् पहुँच

Within living memory, electricity was a Kathmandu luxury. The 2021 census found 92% of households connected, and the 18-hour load-shedding that defined the 2010s ended in 2017-18, killed by better management before new dams even finished. Nepal now exports monsoon power to India. The next chapter is whether hydropower becomes the export engine the budget has promised for fifty years.

Capped at 100, universal access is now an engineering completion, not an open question.

प्रतिव्यक्ति आय

From $50 a year to $1,400, a 28-fold rise, yet still among Asia's lowest. This is the indicator where the cynics have their strongest case: Nepal's income grew, but slower than nearly every neighbour that started poorer. Korea, China, Vietnam, Bangladesh all overtook. Geography explains part of it; the ledgers on this site document the rest.

Mechanical trend in current dollars; graduation from least-developed-country status is scheduled for 2026.

जनसंख्या

Three and a half times more Nepalis than in 1952, and the curve is now bending hard. Fertility fell below replacement level in 2022; a quarter of the working-age population is abroad at any moment. Nepal will grow old before the mechanical trend line says it grows big, which makes the next twenty years the decisive window for building anything.

Growth is decelerating fast, fertility fell below replacement in 2022. The 2050 figure may prove high.