Multilingual Education in Nepal: Policy and Practice Background Dr:. Dan Raj Regmi* Nepal is characterized by rich ethnic, cultural and linguistic diversity. There are more than 100 officially recognized castes and ethnic groups with different social and cultural back grounds and 92 plus officially recognized languages belonging to four language families, viz. Indo-Aryan, Tibeto-Burman, Austro-Asiatic and Dravidian. Such diversity has been acknowledged as an asset since time immemorial in Nepal. However, it has been a major challenge for ensuring the right of children, especially from minority speech communities, / to receive basic education. One of the goals of basic education has been to ensure the right to every child, irrespective of background, to receive quality education. Multilingual edu cation has been acknowledged as a crucial means for achieving this goal by providing children with early and easy access to education and enabling them to participate in learm v ing processes according to their evolving capacities (Shaeffer, 2007). Nepal has made a commitment in 2000 at the World Education Forum in Dakar "to ensure that by 2015 all children, particularly girls and children from ethnic minorities will have access to complete free and compulsory primary quality education." Attempts have been made on behalf of governmental, non-governmental and international agencies for more than a decade. The Central Department ofLinguistics, Tribhuvan University, has also been involved in the activities directly or indirecly related to multilingual education since 2009. Despite all the attempts, the access to free and compulsory primary quality education of all the children, especially girls, from ethnic minorities has not yet been ensured satisfactorily. A nunber ofhurdles have occurred in the planning and implementation of effective multilin gual education programmes in Nepal. This paper is an attempt to provide an overview of the policy and practice of multilingual education and to suggest some measures for the proper implementation of multilingual education in Nepal. It is organized into seven sec tions that deal with the educational situation of the non-Nepali speaking children, the legal provisions for multilingual education in Nepal, the policy for multilingual education, t practice of multilingual education in the country, the challenges of multilingual education in Nepal, and suggestions for effective planning and implementation of multilingual education in Nepal. *Dr. Regmi is Head and Associate Professor of Central Department of Linguistics, T.U. Kitripur