- The administration improved public services by clearing passport backlogs, speeding up national exams, and banning disruptive political unions to restore bureaucratic order.
- Aggressive demolition of riverbank settlements has displaced thousands of squatters, sparking a humanitarian crisis and concerns over the government's lack of relocation planning.
- A relentless anti-corruption blitz has targeted formerly untouchable political bosses and corporate oligarchs, challenging decades of immunity through high-profile arrests and detentions.
- Frequent use of executive decrees and rushed legal processes have sparked judicial pushback and criticism regarding democratic overreach and the quality of evidence.
Kathmandu, Nepal: For as long as most Nepalis can remember, interacting with the state meant bracing for humiliation. It meant waking up at 4:00 AM to stand in a suffocating, dust-choked line outside the Department of Transport Management, just to be told a clerk had gone on break. It meant waiting six months for national exam results while life hung in a stressful limbo.
Then came the political shift. Driven by a furious, tech-savvy Gen Z movement that shattered decades of traditional political cartels, 36-year-old independent icon Balendra "Balen" Shah and his Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP) took the wheel of government.
Today marks exactly 100 days since Shah stepped into the Prime Minister’s Office. In this breathless, dizzying stretch of time, the country has learned what happens when a state is run not by career politicians, but by a hyper-efficient, uncompromising engineer. For the average citizen, the result is a profound, deeply frustrating paradox: a government that is giving them back their dignity in public service, while simultaneously stripping it away from the most vulnerable on the margins.
The Dignity of Saved Time
To understand what the Shah administration has achieved, one needs only to look at the shrinking queues in Kathmandu.
For the first time in a generation, the bureaucratic gridlock has cracked. The Ministry of Education processed and published the Secondary Education Examination (SEE) and Grade 12 results at a speed that caught schools and families by surprise, allowing a new generation to plan their futures without a stolen gap year.
At the passport and licensing offices, the change feels almost miraculous to locals. The long-stalled backlog of printing national IDs and driving licenses has been aggressively cleared, and a pilot program has quietly begun delivering these documents directly to citizens' doorsteps. By enforcing a strict ban on the political trade unions and student wings that have historically shut down universities and hospitals for weeks on end, the government has restored a basic sense of functional order to public life.
"For thirty years, we were treated like cattle by the state," says 24-year-old engineering student Ayush Shrestha, holding his freshly printed license. "Now, it feels like our time actually matters to them."
The Shadow of the Excavator
Yet, the very same unyielding efficiency that delights a commuter in downtown Kathmandu has brought absolute terror to the banks of the Bagmati and Bishnumati rivers.
For decades, the city's riverbanks have been home to thousands of landless squatters (Sukumbasi), living in fragile shacks of tin and bamboo. In a bid to reclaim public land and clean up the capital's choked waterways, the administration deployed heavy machinery and security forces to tear the settlements down.
The notices were brutally short. The enforcement was unblinking.
The resulting clashes left two dead, scores injured, and thousands of families suddenly homeless. Today, nursing mothers, elderly citizens, and small children are sleeping under blue plastic tarps on the muddy ground, exposed to the elements without running water or toilets.
While the urban middle class cheers the clearing of the riverbanks, human rights workers describe a devastating humanitarian failure.
"They came with bulldozers, but they didn't come with a plan for where my children would sleep tonight," says 42-year-old Suntali Maya Tamang, weeping over the ruins of her home. "Is this the new Nepal we marched for?"
Shaking the Pillars of Absolute Power
While the poor have borne the physical weight of the government's hand, the country's wealthiest and most powerful have experienced a different kind of shock.
For decades, Nepal’s top political bosses and corporate oligarchs operated under a gentleman's agreement of absolute immunity. The Shah administration shattered that agreement in its first month. Armed with findings from past corruption commissions, Home Minister Sudan Gurung launched a relentless anti-corruption blitz that felt like a fiction movie to the public.
The images of former Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli, former Home Minister Ramesh Lekhak, and former Finance Minister Bishnu Paudel being taken into custody for their roles in financial crimes and the violent suppression of past protests sent shockwaves through the country. When corporate tycoons like Deepak Bhatta were put in pre-trial detention, the youth who voted for Balen felt vindicated.
But this aggressive speed has created its own cracks. In his rush to bypass a slow, gridlocked parliament, PM Shah has ruled heavily by executive decrees—including a highly controversial ordinance that granted him singular control over judicial appointments. The courts have already begun to push back against this executive overreach, repeatedly releasing high-profile detainees because state prosecutors, rushing to make headlines, failed to prepare solid legal evidence.
The Human Verdict
As the traditional 100-day "honeymoon period" closes, the romanticism of the revolution is meeting the cold, hard reality of governance.
The story of the Shah government’s first 100 days cannot be told through simple political statistics or viral social media videos. It is written in a complex, conflicting human landscape: it is found in the relief of a student getting their grades on time, the awe of a citizen seeing an untouchable politician face a jail cell, and the quiet sobbing of a mother whose entire life was reduced to rubble in twenty minutes by a state-owned excavator.
Balen Shah has proven beyond doubt that he possesses the strength to break the old system. The question for the next 100 days is whether his government can learn to temper that strength with mercy, ensuring that in its rush to build a modern, efficient nation, it does not crush the very people it was chosen to save.
