Mid-October is the deadline the government set for itself. The 21-point capital-market reform action plan, announced on September 15, 2026, says the legal amendments needed to open Nepal's secondary securities market to non-resident Nepalese will be submitted to Cabinet by mid-October. If that happens, NRNs could for the first time buy and sell shares directly on NEPSE. If it does not, the promise joins a long shelf of pledges made to the diaspora and quietly shelved.
The plan names the exact locks that have to be opened. Two laws stand in the way: the Foreign Investment and Technology Transfer Act, 2019 and the Foreign Exchange (Regulation) Act, 1962. Amendments to both are to be proposed to Cabinet by Asoj-end 2083, which is mid-October 2026, according to Fiscal Nepal's account of the action plan, and the Kathmandu Post reports the same mid-October Cabinet target. Every rupee an NRN would put into the secondary market has to travel through these two Acts. Today, that road is closed.
This is not the first time the road was supposed to open. Finance Minister Dr. Swarnim Wagle's May 30 budget speech already carried provisions enabling NRN participation in the secondary securities market, alongside a shift from prior central-bank approval to a notification system for repatriating investment (myRepublica). Years earlier, SEBON formed a committee under then-chairman Rewat Bahadur Karki to study opening the secondary market to direct NRN investment and draft a working procedure within two months (myRepublica). Budget speeches have pledged this before. None of it has ever reached an NRN's trading screen.
Two NRN stories are circulating this week, and they need separating. On October 6, SEBON registered the 8th amendment to the Securities Registration and Issuance Regulation, making IPOs of up to 85% of issued capital legal. But as this site's October 7 analysis showed, the amendment's operative text never names NRNs or the NRN Nepal Development Fund. That was the primary market, and it is signed and stamped. The secondary-market opening is a different and larger change, and it is still a proposal that needs two Acts amended. One door is built. The other is still on the drawing board.
The market, for its part, is not pricing in the promise. On October 2, NEPSE fell 11.90 points, or 0.45%, to close at 2,587.25, capping a week in which the index lost 42.55 points, Farsight Nepal reported. Turnover was Rs 4.29 billion across 43,685 transactions. This came after the 21-point plan's announcement, and the report's read was blunt: investors remain cautious and are waiting for concrete implementation rather than reacting to policy announcements alone. A reform plan that cannot lift the index it is meant to revive has a credibility problem, and the market is saying so in the only language it trusts.
Even if the amendments clear Cabinet, the plumbing decides whether any NRN actually trades. Demat and TMS accounts opened from abroad, foreign-exchange routing for buy orders, repatriation of sale proceeds: each step has to work for someone living in Doha, Kuala Lumpur or London, not just on paper in Kathmandu. The NRN Nepal Development Fund says it has built a Diaspora Investment Management System to verify NRN eligibility and open TMS and demat accounts, integrated with CDS and Clearing and brokers, according to its chief executive's remarks to Businesspana. The industry side is preparing. The legal side is the bottleneck, and it has a date: mid-October.
That date is now days away. Either the two amendment drafts land on Cabinet's table or the deadline slips like the ones before it. The honest position is to watch the Cabinet's decisions, not the speeches. If the amendments pass, the next question is the plumbing. If they do not, NRNs will have their answer about what this promise was worth.