Two weeks after the formation of a new government under Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli, vice-chairman of the National Planning Commission (NPC) Govinda Raj Pokhrel and the rest of the NPC members have resigned their posts.

The resignation letters were submitted to NPC Chairman and Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli on Sunday.

Pokhrel said that he and the other NPC members appointed under the Nepali Congress (NC) quota had expressed their desire to leave before Dashain. “However, the Prime Minister hinted that it would be better if all the members quit at the same time. So we waited till the end of the festival,” Pokhrel said.

According to Pokhrel, the decision to resign en masse was agreed upon by all the NPC members. “It was decided at a formal meeting,” Pokhrel said. The NPC under Pokhrel had been formed by the Sushil Koirala administration.

It is customary for the members of the NPC to quit to make way for a new batch after a change in government. Apart from Pokhrel, the other members who have resigned are Govinda Nepal, Yagya Bahadur Karki, Chandra Mani Adhikari, Bhartendu Mishra, Prem Prasad Dangal, Swarnim Wagle and Bimala Rai Paudyal.

Pokhrel, Wagle, Mishra and Karki had been appointed under the NC quota while Govinda Nepal, Chandra Mani Adhikari, Prem Dangal and Bimala Rai had been selected under the CPN-UML quota.

Since the Oli administration has been supported by a number of political parties including the UCPN (Maoist) and Rastriya Prajatantra Party – Nepal, the third and fourth largest political parties in Parliament respectively, the composition of the NPC will depend on their nominations.

The NPC is the apex advisory body of the government for formulating a national vision, periodic plans and policies for development. The NPC assesses resource needs, identifies sources of funding and allocates budgets for socio-economic development.

The outgoing NPC members had played an instrumental role in the aftermath of the April 25 earthquake. The government had succeeded in garnering international support worth $4.4 billion, or two-thirds of the total funding required for Nepal’s reconstruction effort as estimated by the NPC’s Post-Disaster Needs Assessment (PDNA).

Pokhrel had also been named as the chief executive officer of the National Reconstruction Authority (NRA), which is mandated to oversee the reconstruction of structures damaged in the April 25 disaster. The authority, however, lost its validity after Parliament did not endorse a bill to replace the ordinance under which it had been set up.