Step inside any pasals in Nepal and the world is small and specific: a glass counter cloudy with fingerprints, shelves of instant noodles and mustard oil arranged with private logic, a dog asleep near the door, a proprietor who knows you and probably your four generation. The shopkeeper extends credit on a Tuesday without asking. He/She knows which festival is coming and which goods you will need for it. They are, without anyone having legislated it, a node in the social infrastructure of neighbourhood, a confessor, a loan officer, a notice board and a meeting place, all at once.

According to the UN Capital Development Fund, kirana stores make up nearly 90 per cent of the country’s entire retail sector. Yet something is changing, and changing fast. It is transforming through the steady accumulation of pressures that are reshaping how Nepal buys, sells and, by extension, how it lives.

The clearest emblem of this change is Bhat-Bhateni. What started in 1984 as a modest cold store near Naxal, Kathmandu, opened with an investment of a mere NRs 35,000 by Min Bahadur Gurung, an economics graduate who was still commuting from a banking job in Nepalgunj. Today the chain operates 27 outlets across the country, employs more than 22,000 people and records daily sales exceeding NRs 5.5 crore. Its annual turnover reached NRs 30.62bn in 2024, growing at nearly 3 per cent even against a sluggish economy. Footfall across its stores reportedly exceeds 50,000 people per day.

Big Mart, Sales Berry and KK Market are other examplers. Online retailers, most prominently Daraz, are eating into categories that were once the exclusive province of the corner shop. New apps modelled on rapid-delivery services allow Kathmandu residents to order kirana-style goods without walking to the end of their lane.

Consumers in Nepal’s growing urban middle class, increasingly time-pressed and mobile, value the wider selection, consistent quality and fixed pricing that supermarkets offer. For a country where kirana shops have often been accused of opaque pricing and occasional black-marketing, the formal retail model promises accountability. Employment at the chain is formal, taxed and, for the 95 per cent of its workforce who are women, often represents their first structured job.

The country is, by every measure, one of the ten fastest-urbanising countries in Asia. Its urban population grew from 22 to 27 per cent between 2011 and 2021, and the Kathmandu Valley alone accounts for an estimated 23 per cent of national GDP. The rural-to-urban migration driving this shift dismantles, community by community, the dense networks of obligation and familiarity that the neighbourhood pasal both expressed and sustained. When a village empties, its shop closes. When a family moves to Kathmandu and rents a flat in Lalitpur or Kirtipur, they shop at a Big Mart three blocks away and order the rest online. They do not know the shopkeeper’s name.

The pasal is a custodian of local particularity in ways that are difficult to inventory but easy to lose. The Newar spice merchant whose family has sold timur and jimbu from the same Asan stall for three generations carries embedded knowledge about sourcing, preparation and seasonality that no supply-chain algorithm preserves. The tea-shop owner in a Tamang village who knows which herbs to stock before Dashain and which remedies to keep near the counter holds a form of community pharmacy that no Bhat-Bhateni branch on the highway provides. These micro-worlds of knowledge and relationship do not transfer to the cloud when a shop closes.

It is worth being clear: many Nepali pasals operated as informal monopolies within their lanes, charged arbitrary prices to customers with no alternatives, and survived on the inertia of geography rather than the quality of their service. The arrival of formal competition is not obviously cruel. For women especially who make up the majority of daily shoppers but rarely owned the pasals they depended upon, the transparent pricing and wider selection of formal retail can represent genuine liberation.

Nor is the demise of small retail foreordained. The picture across Nepal is uneven. In Thamel and the tourist districts, independently-owned shops have found resilience by catering to foreign visitors willing to pay for authenticity. In some hill towns, cooperatively-owned community stores have emerged as successors to the individual pasal, preserving some of the social function while achieving better economics. The UNCDF’s work with digital financial services helping kirana owners use platforms like Khalti to accept digital payments, process utility bills and manage inventory suggests that some of the efficiency gap between small shops and large chains can be closed through technology rather than elimination.

The question for Nepal is not whether the pasal can survive unchanged, it cannot. The question is whether, in its transformation, anything essential survives with it. The country is young, rapidly urbanising and rightly ambitious about economic development. Its policymakers are understandably more interested in building hydropower dams and attracting foreign investment than in preserving the architecture of traditional retail. And yet, as the economists of the OECD have noted of similar transitions elsewhere, retail SMEs and the family-owned shop is the purest expression of this category, are not merely economic units. They are the connective tissue of communities, the daily ritual through which people experience themselves as belonging to a place and to each other.

Nepal is choosing development, which is rational and necessary. What would be useful and what is largely absent from the national conversation is some honest accounting of what development, in this particular domain, costs. The last generation of shopkeepers will not appear as a line item in anyone’s budget. The social debt their passing accumulates, however, will eventually have to be paid.

There is a useful distinction, borrowed from the British newspaper Financial Times, between a newspaper and a bulletin board. A newspaper challenges its readers. A bulletin board tells them what they already believe. The FT has long maintained that its job is to follow the evidence wherever it leads, on free trade, on capital markets, on the limits of state capacity, even when that evidence irritates its own subscribers. That willingness to be unpopular with its own audience is precisely what gives it authority.

By that standard, Kantipur‚ Nepal’s most-read daily, and the newspaper-of-record, has been drifting toward the bulletin board end of the spectrum. Founded in 1993, it emerged in the early years of Nepal’s democratic opening as something the country had rarely possessed. A professionally run, commercially independent press organisation with genuine national reach.

The paper has real achievements to its name, and they deserve acknowledgment. Kantipur’s investigative work, on cooperative sector fraud, on procurement corruption, on political nexus and illegal land transactions, has been genuinely important. Its disaster and conflict reporting has taken journalists to places most Kathmandu media avoids. It has confronted prime ministers and, on occasion, paid a price for doing so. That record is not nothing. It is, in fact, the foundation on which the paper’s credibility rests.

But foundations require maintenance. And Kantipur’s has been quietly undermined by a decade of editorial choices that have made the paper increasingly comfortable, increasingly predictable, and decreasingly useful to anyone who doesn’t already share the assumptions of Kathmandu’s educated left.

Nothing illustrates the pattern more clearly than Kantipur’s coverage of the Millennium Challenge Corporation compact, the $500 million US grant for roads and electricity transmission that spent years paralysed in political controversy before Parliament finally ratified it in February 2022.

The compact was contentious. Questions about Nepal’s sovereignty, its geopolitical position between India and China, and its development priorities were all legitimate subjects for journalistic scrutiny. But Kantipur’s coverage tilted. The framing of MCC as a potential American strategic intrusion, with Kantipur columns and news analysis repeatedly giving oxygen to the “Indo-Pacific Strategy trap” narrative, did not emerge in a vacuum. It reflected a broader editorial reflex: instinctive suspicion of Western capital and American intent, combined with a conspicuous reluctance to examine with equal rigour the interests of the parties stoking anti-MCC sentiment, including China’s well-documented disinformation campaign against the compact.

The paper’s eventual editorial position, published after ratification, was sensible enough, it acknowledged the compact’s value and the damage caused by years of delay. But the path to that position had been anything but straight. The accumulated coverage gave far more column inches and credibility to opponents of the grant than to those making the economic case for it. A $500 million infrastructure gift, the sort of thing that small developing economies dream of, was treated by Nepal’s leading newspaper with more editorial suspicion than a Belt and Road initiative that came with loans, conditions, and strategic strings of its own.

This is not about being pro-American. It is about consistency. Apply the same scrutiny to all sources of foreign capital and all geopolitical interests, or apply it to none. Kantipur applied it selectively.

Kantipur’s economic coverage suffers from a related asymmetry. Nepal has, for thirty years, chronically underperformed its potential. Its young people leave to Qatar, to Malaysia, to wherever someone will hire them, in numbers that represent one of the highest emigration rates in Asia relative to population. Remittances now constitute roughly a quarter of GDP, which means the economy is substantially kept alive by people who have given up on finding opportunity at home.

The reasons for this are not mysterious. Nepal’s regulatory environment is punishing for small businesses. Its energy sector, despite sitting atop one of the great hydropower resources on the planet, 83,000 MW of technical potential, barely 3,000 MW developed, has been strangled by the intersection of political interest and state control. Foreign investors who want to build power projects face a legal framework that, as one analysis noted, is still governed by an Electricity Act dating from 1992.

Kantipur covers these symptoms diligently. It reports on youth unemployment, on the remittance economy, on power cuts, on the failures of public enterprise. What it covers far less seriously are the structural arguments about why these problems persist and what would actually fix them. The proposition that Nepal needs less state intervention in its economy, not more, that deregulation, private capital, and competitive markets are the primary engines through which comparable countries have climbed out of poverty, is not a fringe position. It is the consensus finding of development economics over the past forty years, from Bangladesh’s garment sector to Vietnam’s export transformation to India’s post-1991 growth surge.

That argument deserves serious, regular engagement in Nepal’s leading newspaper. It does not get it. The economic vocabulary of Kantipur’s opinion section, “exploitation,” “neo-liberal agenda,” “corporate capture”, signals before the analysis begins which conclusions are acceptable.

The opinion section is where a newspaper’s soul is most visible, and Kantipur’s soul is predominantly left. That is not an accusation, it is a description. The question is whether the paper has been honest with itself, and its readers, about it.

Khagendra Sangraula, a veteran socialist writer and one of Kantipur’s most prominent columnists, is a genuine literary intellectual whose moral seriousness commands respect. His writing on caste, on political culture, on the responsibilities of the Nepali intelligentsia has been important. But Sangraula’s framework is explicitly Marxist, and his columns proceed from assumptions, about the primacy of class struggle, about the inherent suspiciousness of private capital, that represent one tradition of political thought, not the only serious one. When Kantipur features him without counterweight, it is not presenting a debate; it is presenting a tradition.

CK Lal is a more complex case. Writing across Kantipur and the Kathmandu Post, Lal’s diagnosis that Nepal’s political culture remains shaped by a “power-centric mindset” rooted in Prithvi Narayan Shah and the Rana era is historically grounded. But Lal’s columns on economic questions skew heavily toward statist solutions, and his occasional forays into geopolitics reflect a worldview in which Western capital and American power are treated as presumptively suspect in ways that China’s capital and power are not subjected to symmetrically.

Ahuti, Bishwa Bhakta Dulal, is a Dalit intellectual and former Maoist constituent assembly member. His argument that Dalit liberation requires a classless society is a sincere position held by a thinker who has lived the consequences of caste discrimination in ways that most opinion editors have not. What also belongs in the paper, and is largely absent, is the counter-argument: that economic freedom and property rights, not class struggle, have done more to lift marginalised communities out of poverty in the countries where they have been seriously tried; that the communist parties to which Ahuti devoted decades have demonstrably failed Nepal’s Dalits despite their rhetoric; and that Ambedkar’s critique of both caste Hinduism and Marxist economic organisation is as relevant to Nepal as to India.

Those counter-arguments exist. Serious people hold them. Kantipur does not give them a home. The pattern that emerges from the columns page is not a conspiracy. It is something more banal and more durable, it is an editorial culture so internally consistent that it has stopped noticing its own shape. If you have read Sangraula, Lal, and Ahuti for a decade, the assumptions they share start to feel like the assumptions of reality itself. Other assumptions, about markets, about the limits of the state, about individual economic freedom, start to feel like ideology requiring special justification.

Sambhav Sirohiya, who now runs Kantipur Media Group, has navigated the structural crisis of print journalism in a poor country with more competence than most. The Kantipur Conclave brings international voices and genuine intellectual ambition to Kathmandu. When his father Kailash Sirohiya opened this year’s conclave by arguing that “a conscious society is built on accurate information, debate and dialogue,” he was articulating a principle that Kantipur has the scale to embody but currently falls short of.

Nepal is a country that has been governed, in various forms, by state-heavy politics for most of its modern history, by monarchy, by the Panchayat system, and since 1990 by a democratic politics dominated by parties whose intellectual formation is Marxist even when their practice is anything but. The results are visible in every emigration statistic, every power-cut bulletin, every ranking of ease of doing business in which Nepal sits at bottom of South Asia.

A newspaper that takes this record seriously should be running a sustained, open, intellectually honest interrogation of those assumptions, not to replace one orthodoxy with another, but because the country’s development challenges are too serious for its leading media institution to be running a seminar in one school of political thought.

The Financial Time’s longstanding principle, that markets, properly regulated, remain the most effective mechanism humanity has found for generating broad prosperity, is not ideological dogma. It is an empirical claim, contested in its details but supported by the weight of development experience across four decades and dozens of countries. Kantipur’s editorial board should engage with that claim seriously: test it against Nepal’s context, push back where the evidence demands it, but not dismiss it before the argument is made.

Kantipur was built on the proposition that Nepali readers deserved a serious newspaper. They still do. Giving them one, a paper that trusts them with the full complexity of public argument, including arguments that challenge the paper’s own editorial instincts, is not a commercial risk. It is the only sustainable foundation for the authority that Kantipur has spent thirty years trying to build.

That authority is eroding. It can be recovered. But not by publishing, week after week, the same conversation Nepal’s educated left is already having with itself.