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Jan Sharma holds a Ph. D. in Political Science from the Tribhuvan University. He began his career in journalism with The Rising Nepal in 1974 as sub-editor. He joined the Rastriya Samachar Samiti, the national news agency, in 1976 as a reporter and also for a while worked as a desk editor. He resumed reporting in 1980 and covered the historic national referendum. He reported on foreign affairs, water resources and tourism as his first beats. He subsequently became Chief Reporter.

Following the political changes in 1990, he resigned to devote full time to Gemini News Service and the Panos Institute based in London. He was involved in a number of research works. He led a team of researchers to evaluate the Master Plan for the Forestry Sector Project, funded by Finnish International Development Agency (FINNIDA), and subsequently the Hill Forestry Development Project, the results of which were published in Whose Trees?: A People’s View of Forestry Aid (the Panos Institute and FINNIDA, 1991), which also included evaluation study of Finnish-assisted forestry in Sudan and Tanzania besides Nepal.

As founding editor of The Independent, the weekly tabloid launched in February 1991, he helped to introduce non-partisan, quality journalism in Nepal. It was acclaimed as a truly independent newspaper for championing democracy, free market and expression, and independent foreign policy as well as reflecting wide divergence of views in the Nepali society. He quit the newspaper following policy differences in early 1993.

Between 1993 and 1995, he served the World Bank as its Public Affairs Consultant, assisting in regular dialogue between the Bank and private sector entrepreneurs, non-governmental organizations involved in socio-economic issues, and the mass media. The work offered him with first-hand and critical insights into Nepal’s development efforts as well as the gap between the thinking processes of donors and Nepali decision-makers in terms of policy formulation and performance as well as popular expectations.

In 1996, under a British fellowship, Dr. Sharma went to the University of Oxford. There he focused his research on Nepal’s democracy-building efforts between 1990 and 1995. His findings, published as a book, Democracy Without Roots, 1998, identified deficient political leadership and the yawning gap between promises and performance as the key problems in the country’s democratic experiment. He also had predicted a revival of assertive monarchy.

Dr. Sharma continues to maintain strong interest in state- and democracy-building. He has published a number of research articles in these areas in professional and academic journals. His most recent paper, coauthored with Prof. Ganga Bahadur Thapa, From Insurgency to Democracy: The Challenges of Peace and Democracy Building in Nepal, appeared in the International Political Science Review (Vol. 30, No. 2, March 2009). He also serves as executive member of the Nepal Institute of Development Studies as well as the Center for Democracy and Conflict Analysis in Kathmandu.

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