Nepal, June 3 -- When Finance Minister Swarnim Wagle walked into a joint session of the Parliament on May 29, he bypassed the traditional red briefcase for a file made of handmade Nepali paper-signalling a departure from political tradition before he even uttered a word. He then delivered a curated story to pitch ambitious reforms that only a government with this scale of mandate can.

At Rs2.124 trillion, the largest in Nepal's history, this budget arrives with genuine political authority. The headline measures-reduction in income tax rates and change in brackets for salaried people, simplification of customs tariff and establishment of a sovereign data centre-are crowd-pleasing and substantively real. But questions around fiscal honesty...