Thesis Proposal Format for Nepali Universities: Structure, Example and What Supervisors Check

17 October 2026 · 9 min read

A thesis proposal in Nepal is a gate, not a formality. At Tribhuvan University, Pokhara University and Kathmandu University, your synopsis or proposal goes to a supervisor, then a departmental committee, and sometimes a defence, before you are allowed to collect a single piece of data. Proposals get sent back for predictable reasons: a topic too wide for a master's thesis, objectives that do not match the research questions, a methodology section that names a design but describes nothing. This guide gives the standard section order, what each section must contain, a short worked example, and the checkpoints to pass before you submit.

One caution before the structure: departments override general advice. TU's Faculty of Management, the Central Department of English, KU's School of Science and PU's constituent colleges each publish or circulate their own proposal skeleton, and they differ on details like whether the budget sits inside the proposal or as an annex. Use this as the reliable default, then reconcile it against your department's current format before submission.

The standard section order

Across Nepali universities the proposal runs eight to twelve pages and follows this sequence. Where a section is optional, that is noted.

Title page: the working title, your name and roll number, the programme and campus, the supervisor's name (once assigned), and the submission date.
Introduction or background: two to three paragraphs that locate the topic, establish that a real problem exists, and end by naming the gap your study addresses.
Statement of the problem: the specific problem, narrowed to a population, a setting and a time frame. This is usually its own subsection and it is where committees look first.
Research objectives: three to five objectives, each starting with an action verb (to assess, to compare, to examine). Every later section must trace back to one of these.
Research questions or hypotheses: questions for descriptive and exploratory studies; testable hypotheses for analytical ones. Not both unless the design genuinely needs both.
Significance or rationale: who benefits from the answer and how. A paragraph, not a page.
Scope and limitations (sometimes delimitations): what the study covers and what it deliberately does not.
Review of literature: the substantive section — see the next heading.
Research methodology: the most scrutinised section — covered in detail below.
Chapter organisation or tentative structure: a list of the planned chapters.
Timeline or work plan: a simple table by month. Nepali academic calendars slip; build in a buffer.
Budget (where required): itemised, in NPR, and modest. Fieldwork travel and printing dominate most student budgets.
References: every source cited, in the department's required style — APA 7th for most TU management and education programmes, Vancouver for most medical and health programmes.
Annexes (optional at proposal stage): draft instruments such as a questionnaire or interview guide.

The literature review at proposal stage

At proposal stage the committee is not expecting the finished review; it is checking that you know the field exists and where your study sits in it. Organise by theme or variable, not by author ("Sharma (2020) said... Thapa (2021) said..." is the single most common reason proposals return for revision). For each theme: what is established, what is contested, and what is missing — the missing part should point at your study.

Use real sources you have actually opened. Nepali committees increasingly run proposals through Turnitin, and a literature review stitched together from abstract text flags both as plagiarism and as unfamiliarity. Check your draft against the public web before submission with a free plagiarism checker so a borrowed sentence does not reach the committee at all.

The methodology section committees scrutinise

Naming a design is not describing one. "The study will use a descriptive research design" tells the committee nothing. For each element below, write what you will actually do:

Design: the type, plus what makes it that type. A cross-sectional survey says data is collected once, from a sample, with a structured instrument.
Population and sample: who the study population is, the sampling frame you can actually access, the sampling technique, and the sample size with its basis (a formula, a rule of thumb with a citation, or coverage of an accessible population).
Data and instruments: the questionnaire, interview guide or observation checklist, its main sections, and how it was or will be validated and pretested.
Procedure: where and when data will be collected, and the permissions needed — campus, school, health post or ward office letters, plus IRC approval for health research.
Analysis: the actual techniques by name, matched to objectives. "Data will be analysed using SPSS" is not an analysis plan; "Objective 2 will be tested with a chi-square test of independence at the 5% level" is.

A short worked example

To see the skeleton filled in, here is the core of a proposal that would pass most departmental committees, compressed for illustration:

Title: Factors Influencing Adoption of Digital Payment Systems among Small Retailers in Pokhara Metropolitan City.
Problem: despite national growth in digital payments, small retailers in secondary cities report low and uneven adoption, and existing Nepali studies concentrate on consumers in Kathmandu rather than merchants elsewhere.
Objectives: to assess the level of digital payment adoption among small retailers in Pokhara; to identify the factors associated with adoption; to examine the barriers non-adopting retailers report.
Method: cross-sectional survey of 180 small retailers selected by stratified random sampling across three wards; structured questionnaire pretested on 20 retailers; descriptive statistics and logistic regression in SPSS.
Significance: findings give municipal economic-development units and payment providers merchant-side evidence that consumer-side studies do not.

Notice what the example does: every objective maps to a method, the population is named and reachable, the sample has a number and a technique, and the problem is local and specific. That mapping, more than the topic, is what gets a proposal approved.

The checkpoints that send proposals back

Scope: a topic answerable at national scale proposed by one student with one semester. Narrow by population, setting and period until the methods fit the words.
Objective-question mismatch: each research question must be covered by at least one objective and vice versa.
A sample size with no stated basis, or a sampling frame the student cannot actually access.
Literature review organised as an author-by-author summary instead of themes.
Referencing that mixes styles or cites sources the review never uses. Turnitin flags borrowed review paragraphs before the committee reads anything else.
A timeline with no buffer, ending exactly on the submission date — committees read this as a plan that has already failed.

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Thesis report — Similarity and AI reports for a full thesis or dissertation, run chapter by chapter so a problem in the literature review is found while you can still fix it, with each flagged passage explained for your supervisor.