India and China not giving a damn about Nepal can't be correct. Why would they be intervening with Nepali politics should they really don't care?
Development of UP and Tibet having effect in Nepal is quite obvious. Just look at Eastern European countries being supported by developed EU neighbours, eastern asian nations developing because of developing or developed neighbours, Mexico's economy more or less being dependent on its developed neighbour USA. We can see several other clusters of rich countries in certain parts of the world and their neighbours reaping the benefits, unless the neighbouring regime has totally different ideology to the developed ones. If people and the region UP and Tibet do get highly educated and developed it surely will bring positive effect to Nepal.
About getting real, no matter how strong Nepal becomes because of its unfortunate geographic poitioning, India and China will always fiddle with it, as we all know that Nepal will never be able to surpass them in strenght both economically and militarily. Example of this will be the forced changes in privacy laws brought about in Liechtenstein by Germany and other developed nations even though it is the richest country in the world in terms of per capita GDP.