The government has decided to curb and streamline foreign visits by ministers and secretaries.

A Cabinet meeting on Wednesday decided to cut on official trips amid complaints of mismanagement of foreign visits and junkets by ministers and secretaries, said Prithvi Subba Gurung, the minister for communication and information technology.

Now onwards, ministers and secretaries serving at the same ministry cannot go on foreign visits together or at the same time, said Gurung. Both minister and secretary will not attend the same function, event, and programme, he added.

“It has been decided that ministers and secretaries of the same ministry will not participate in the same event. Such visits will not be approved,” said Gurung. Having no minister and secretary in a ministry will hamper government work. “We took this decision so as not to affect service delivery and good governance."

Successive governments have taken such decisions, announced to minimise foreign visits by ministers and secretaries as an austerity measure but none of them have been followed seriously.

In 2021, the government issued new standards for austerity that curbed observation trips to foreign countries paid with Nepal government’s resources. No foreign trip will involve more than three persons except for visits by VIPs. Likewise, government agencies cannot deploy more than three persons for project monitoring, according to the 2021 guidelines, which were not implemented.

“If you look at the Cabinet’s decisions, half of them are related to the foreign visits of senior leaders and officials,” said a secretary at the prime minister’s office, wishing not to be named. “We need to discourage ministers and secretaries from going on unnecessary foreign trips. In our practice, the minister is the political head of the ministry and secretary the administrative head.”

In such a case, when both—political and administrative heads—are not present at a given time, how can good governance be realised and service delivery effective, the secretary questioned.

Wednesday’s Cabinet meeting also approved the code of conduct for ministers’ foreign visits. According to the new code, ministers and secretaries cannot participate in the same event abroad, ministers will only attend and participate in ministerial-level meetings, not a general talk or debate. They are allowed to participate only in events where policy issues are discussed.

Similarly, ministers will attend the events where their presence is required in a global forum or participate in a vote where Nepal must take a side on a resolution. If any bilateral agreement or understanding is to be signed by a minister, then the minister will go for it, said Gurung. The ministers will not attend unimportant events, he said.

Minister Gurung said the official delegation of the president and the prime minister must not exceed 21. But this yardstick has been violated several times in the past by the presidents and prime ministers themselves. Even secretaries and joint-secretaries are not allowed to participate in the same event abroad as one of them must be in the country so that service delivery is not hampered, added Gurung.

The government has also made it mandatory for a delegation to have at least a third of its members women. If two people are going on a foreign trip, one must be a woman, he said.