New Delhi — Nepal’s finance minister, who is also a top leader of the Maoists who won national elections last April, said on Thursday that his new government planned to give academic degrees to people who could not pursue education because they were involved in the Maoists’ armed conflict, reported Kantipur Online.

“Our friends abandoned study and got involved in the revolution,” said the finance minister, Baburam Bhattarai, at a meeting organized by the Maoist-affiliated All Nepal National Independent Students’ Union-Revolutionary. “Whatever skill and knowledge they earned, they must receive recognition.”

People “who could not receive formal education due to financial problem and other reasons but possess sufficient skill and knowledge” must also be provided with degrees, he said. The degrees would be granted through open universities.

For a little over a decade, Maoist rebels in Nepal waged an often-violent insurrection against earlier governments and eventually overthrew the monarchy.

Mr. Bhattarai also said that private educational institutions of the country needed to look for “alternative means for [making] investments” because education is the state’s responsibility, reported Nepalnews. The minister said that the failed education policies of past governments had encouraged private investment in the education sector, but that this was no longer needed. —Shailaja Neelakantan