Education Minister Dinanath Sharma has initiated the incorporation of vocational subjects in school-level education, which was a failure in late 80s under Nepal Education Policy.

Sharma has said the archaic Education Act 1971 still in practice carries the essence of Panchayat rule and is the root cause of today's problems.

According to the mid-term and final review of the vocational education implemented in each school under NEP, only seven per cent graduates landed jobs that matched with their degrees.

The main cause, as indicated by the review report, was the lack of technical manpower in the schools and market.

Technical Education Expert and Dean at the Department of Education of Kathmandu University Tanka Nath Sharma has called for
increasing the number of technical schools, which are only 15 in total.

He said that the initiation of such schools was started in 1980 as per the recommendation of NEP review report.

Backtracking to the NEP programme does not make sense. But better preparations could be made by calling universities to impart vocational training and create technical education faculties before beginning the technical education in that scale, Sharma said.

Government plans to pilot about hundred schools from the new academic session.

Officials at the Council for Technical Education and Vocational Training said that qualified teachers working in the annex schools supported by CTEVT are doing their job with low morale as their status is unequal to the general teachers and is another pathetic factor, among others.

Moreover, only minimal amount of the total budget in education is allocated for the technical stream, the officials said. The laboratories for the effective education are not easy to set up, lamented Sharma.

Meanwhile, the Ministry of Education has forwarded a Technical Education and Vocational Training (TEVT) Policy in the cabinet, which aims to bring all the programming and funding of technical education through a single channel.

There are various training packages under Ministry of Labour and Transportation Management, Department of Cottage and Small-Scale Industries, Directorate of Professional Skill Development and Training and CTEVT and other directly funded programmes by the donor agencies on their own.

The policy envisages a TEVT fund, which will be the agency funding the technical education.

source: The Himalayan Times,7 April 2012