Kathmandu. The government has decided to reduce the number of federal ministries from 22 to 18 with the main objective of maintaining administrative reforms, maintaining austerity, cutting unnecessary recurrent expenditure and making work performance more effective and efficient.

A meeting of the Council of Ministers held today approved the ‘Government of Nepal (Division of Work) Regulations, 2083’ and decided to reduce the number of ministries.

According to Prime Minister Balendra Shah’s press and research expert Deepa Dahal, the government has kept the ministries of Finance, Home, Foreign Affairs, Defense and Law, Justice and Parliamentary Affairs as they are. Similarly, the ministries of industry, commerce and supplies, culture, tourism and civil aviation, and energy, water resources and irrigation ministries have also remained unchanged. The government has formed a separate ‘Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation’ to look after the works related to new innovations by taking science and technology from the then Ministry of Education and looking after the newly added innovations.

Ministries of similar nature have been integrated with extensive changes in the work division of other ministries. As per the agreement, the Ministry of Education and Sports, the Ministry of Communications, the Ministry of Youth, Labour and Employment, and the Ministry of Land, Cooperatives and Human Resources will now be there. Similarly, the Ministry of Women, Children, Gender and Sexual Minority and Social Security, the Ministry of Health and Food Security, the Ministry of Infrastructure Development and the Ministry of Agriculture, Forest and Environment have been rescheduled.

The work related to information technology that was being carried out by the erstwhile Ministry of Communications and Information Technology has now been merged with the Office of the Prime Minister and Council of Ministers.

Under the ‘100 Agenda for Governance Reforms’ issued immediately after the formation of the new government, a plan was put forward to review the number of ministries for administrative reforms and expenditure cuts. According to Dahal, work division, name change and merger of ministries were done on the basis of the report submitted by the ‘Restructuring Management Secretariat’ formed under the coordination of Secretary Govinda Bahadur Karki. According to the government, this step has been taken to solve the problem of increasing current expenditure due to the number of ministries being larger than the requirement and to make the state mechanism efficient.