When Covid-19 reached Nepal in early 2020, everything came to a halt. The once-bustling streets of Kathmandu fell silent. In the villages, an even deeper stillness took hold. Families stopped hearing from loved ones working abroad. Schools closed. Health centers ran out of medicine. People felt completely alone.

For many, the hardship went far beyond staying indoors. The virus made it hard to breathe, but so did poverty and fear. Countless families lost their sole breadwinner. That meant no food, no school, and no hope. Nepal didn’t just get sick. It broke. And the weight of that breaking felt insurmountable.

But what if the crisis that brought Nepal to its knees wasn’t the final chapter, but the necessary prologue to a national reinvention?

Forget “recovery.” Recovery suggests a return to the same fragile system that collapsed at the first tremor. The pandemic wasn’t just a tragedy to repair; it was a revelation. A siren call to abandon broken blueprints and design an economy that actually works. What if the architecture of our collapse could become the model for our rebirth?

Before Covid-19, Nepal was celebrated for its “remittance economy.” We sent our youth abroad, and their earnings helped sustain the nation. But we ignored the true cost. Villages emptied out. Land was abandoned. Families were split across continents. A national identity was built on the loneliness of video calls.

Then the borders closed, remittances collapsed, and the illusion vanished. What we thought was a safety net turned out to be a tightrope—and Covid-19 cut the line.

Tourism, once touted as a cornerstone of our GDP, proved just as fragile. When it collapsed, it left behind shuttered hotels, unemployed guides, and debt-ridden businesses. We had relied too heavily and planned too little.

And what about the informal sector, the backbone for over 70 percent of our workforce? It was always a blind spot we chose to ignore. When lockdowns hit, 1.6 million jobs vanished overnight. No contracts. No insurance. No savings. Just millions rendered invisible by a system that never acknowledged them.

Education failed, too. Many schools turned to online learning—but what about children in villages without internet, electricity, or smartphones? Around 95,000 children, mostly girls, dropped out and never returned. Some were forced into child labor or early marriage. This wasn’t an unforeseen consequence. It exposed a long-standing failure to support the most marginalized.

None of these problems were new. The pandemic simply made them impossible to ignore. It held up a mirror to a system already cracked. And even amid the pain, it gave us something else—a rare chance to build something better.

So what if we stopped exporting our youth and started investing in them at home? What if empty villages became hubs of tea, coffee, and herb production? What if young people were trained to use digital tools to sell their own products?

Imagine if every village had a solar-powered tech center, where children could access online learning, patients could consult doctors remotely, and local businesses could connect with global markets. This is not a fantasy. Nepal has smart, capable young people. Instead of waiting for foreign help, let’s back their ideas.

The government can create youth innovation funds to support small-scale projects in farming, green energy, recycling, and technology. Trust the youth. They understand the problems because they live them. Their solutions are rooted in reality, not written in distant reports.

This isn’t utopian thinking. It’s a survival strategy. Look at our neighbors. Sri Lanka’s economic collapse was built on the same foundations of debt and import dependency. Bangladesh is now facing a foreign reserve crisis. These are not distant warnings; they are potential previews of Nepal’s own future if we try to return to “normal.”

After Covid-19, poverty in Nepal surged again, with rural areas hit hardest. In some regions, one doctor serves thousands. That’s not just unfair, it’s unsustainable. An economy built on foreign labor, foreign remittances, and foreign tourists is neither strong nor safe.

If we go back to the old system, we’re not recovering—we’re refusing to learn. We’re choosing to leave millions behind.

Covid-19 taught us the unimaginable can happen overnight. In just a week, the global systems we depended on were unplugged. That’s terrifying, but also liberating. It showed us that the structures we thought were permanent are, in fact, fragile.

So why rebuild the same system that failed us? The wreckage is all around us. It’s time to stop mourning what we lost and start building what we need. It’s time to turn the memory of our greatest crisis into the blueprint for our greatest awakening.

Let’s not waste this chance. Let’s turn this crisis into a new beginning. We have seen the problems. Now we must build the solutions. Nepal deserves an economy that works for everyone. It’s time to stop waiting, and start building.

Himal Subedi 

Narayani English Public Secondary School, Bharatpur, Chitwan