A Life in Public Service: Nepal from Autocracy to Democracy

About this book

Publication date :  5 January 2026 Print length :  384 pages In 1960, King Mahendra Shah summoned a twenty-four-year-old Nepali PhD student in California to serve as the Member Secretary of National Planning Council. In the extraordinary six-decade long career that followed, Bhekh Bahadur Thapa witnessed first-hand the enormous challenges, as well as the heartbreaks and triumphs, of nation-building in Nepal. He revisits those times, offering deeply personal observations into the transformation of his country, from a feudal protectorate under the rule of the Rana dynasty to its current-day manifestation as a boisterous federal democratic republic. An ‘insider-account’ in the truest sense, A Life in Public Service is a fascinating, intimate look at the modern-day governance of South Asia’s oldest nation.