THE NEPALI

When Sita Badi walked into Nepal’s Ministry of Women, Children and Senior Citizens for the first time as its minister, she wept. The cameras caught it. The image spread. Across the political spectrum, from the left to the right, from veteran parliamentarians to first-time voters, the reaction was the same: praise, and something warmer than praise. Politicians who agree on almost nothing agreed on this. Her appointment, they said, was the beauty of democracy made visible.

Ms Badi, 30, is the first person from the Badi community ever to hold federal ministerial office in Nepal. The Badi, a Dalit sub-group concentrated in Karnali province, occupy one of the lowest rungs of a society long defined by the cruelties of caste. They are among the poorest, the least educated and the most stigmatised of Nepal’s many marginalised communities. The assumption, persistent and corrosive, has long been that Badi women are available for sexual exploitation. 

The earliest chapter of Ms Badi’s life is one that most politicians would not relate. She grew up in Jhuprakhola, ward 11 of Birendranagar Municipality in Surkhet district, in a community of roughly 158 Badi settlements where the primary livelihood was, and in many places remains, the harvesting of sand and stone from the Bheri River. Her parents worked the riverbed. The family was poor, and educating a daughter pressed hard against their means.

“Life itself is struggle,” she told Nepal Television’s current affairs programme Jigyasa on April 24th. “My struggle is no different from anyone else’s. But perhaps mine started earlier.”

At the age of 13, she was brought to Kathmandu by Jyoti Ghar Nepal, an NGO that saw potential in a girl. There she completed her schooling, then a bachelor’s degree in social work, then a master’s degree in political science. For years she volunteered at the organisation that had given her a start, learning what she would later describe as the art of converting solidarity into systems.

Independence, however, was always the destination. “I realised I could not remain dependent on others forever,” she said. She founded Badi Sustain Multipurpose Private Limited, a company that provided skills training in stitching and handicrafts to Dalit and Badi women. She simultaneously ran Sundar Saha Sanstha, a parallel body that supported roughly 30 to 35 children from disadvantaged backgrounds with education and basic needs. When floods or landslides struck remote communities, she mobilised blankets and rations. 

Her path into politics came through the Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP), the reformist movement that swept Nepal’s March 2026 general election under Balendra Shah, the structural engineer and musician who became the country’s youngest prime minister. Ms Badi was elected to the House of Representatives through the proportional representation system, representing the Dalit women’s cluster.

“I had never imagined becoming a member of parliament,” she said. “The thought of becoming a minister had never crossed my mind at all.” When the RSP told her that her community needed a leader from within it, she agreed. The party kept its word. Prime Minister Shah appointed her to the cabinet on March 27th.

Nepal’s Ministry of Women, Children and Senior Citizens is, as Ms Badi freely acknowledges, one of the most demanding portfolios in government and one of the most neglected. Women constitute 51 per cent of Nepal’s population. Children account for 33.8 per cent. Senior citizens represent a further 10 per cent. The ministry is responsible for the welfare of the vast majority of the people. Its budget, relative to this mandate, is almost comedically inadequate.

“This ministry covers nearly everyone,” Ms Badi said, “and yet it receives one of the smallest allocations. Very little appears to have been done, not because no one tried, but because the resources were never there.” She has begun receiving briefings, reviewing laws and calling for monitoring of existing programmes. “It is not enough to say work is being done and move on. We need to be present. We need to check. Without oversight, children in institutions suffer every day in silence.”

On children specifically, she is alarmed. She describes an explosion of child welfare organisations, springing up, in her phrase, like mushrooms, many of which use children’s names to attract funding while delivering little to the children themselves. She wants stricter monitoring and direct conversations with the children in the homes, not just their administrators.

On senior citizens, she describes a pattern she has witnessed firsthand: elderly parents, their children abroad or simply indifferent, left at care homes that lack legal accountability. She visited several such facilities before taking office. “Some parents told me they had been brought there and left. They did not choose it. They want somewhere decent to live, with people who spend time with them.” Her proposed response is legislative: stricter laws, enforced rather than merely enacted.

On gender-based violence and entrenched practices such as the dowry system and chhaupadi, the practice of banishing menstruating women to outdoor huts, still found in parts of Sudurpashchim, she is blunt. “Mediation is not a substitute for consequences,” she said. “When a penalty is written down and not applied immediately, no change comes. Ever.”

Her most striking policy instinct concerns the direction of awareness campaigns. Conventional wisdom in gender advocacy targets women; teach them their rights, empower them to speak. Ms Badi inverts this. “We have focused on raising awareness among women,” she said. “But I believe we must begin with men. When men understand, genuinely understand, then they can support women. Until then, we are asking women to push against a wall that has not moved.”

It is a pragmatic rather than ideological position, born of years working in communities where male gatekeeping determined whether any programme reached women at all. It is also, characteristically, a position rooted in sequencing.

When asked on Jigyasa what she would say to members of her community watching, she said, “first, have somewhere to live. Then food. Then we can talk about education. We must go step by step. But we must go.”

Her asset declaration, released alongside the rest of Prime Minister Shah’s cabinet in April, was the simplest on the list containing wedding gifts of gold, modest savings in two banks, 20 chickens and a dog. No debts. No property. A minister with almost nothing who has spent her life giving what little she had to others.

Nepal has a long tradition of appointing this ministry to politicians who treat it as a waiting room for something better. Ms Badi has no interest in waiting rooms. She grew up in a community that the state had never bothered to enter. She knows what it feels like to be on the other side of an unvisited door. That knowledge, more than any policy paper or budget line, is what she carries into the job. Other ministers study the vulnerable. She was one of them.

The tears at the ministry door needed no explanation. They were not weakness, nor were they surprise. They were the only honest response to a journey that should never have been as hard as it was, made by someone who intends to make sure it is never that hard again