Every person who has waited in a malpot (Land Administration) office for a copy of lalpurja (Land Ownership Certificate) knows that moment. Someone walks into the back room and comes out with the srestha, a ledger too heavy to fit flat on the table. He dips his thumb in water, flips through pages and locates your record. Whatever is written, there is the truth about your land, as far as the state cares. Since those ledgers were burned in the Gen Z protests of September, all the land transactions in some districts just ceased, waiting for someone to recreate a ledger again, one owner at a time.

This week, the Auditor General Toyam Raya told the Public Accounts Committee how much we lost. Records of 179 public bodies were destroyed during the protests of September 8-9. Around Rs148 billion worth of government transactions never got audited because of this. It can be recollected from the banks’ statements and government software, but the proof of whether it was done legally was burned down.

His deputy, Deepak Lamichhane, pointed out that the records could be reconstructed using the general vouchers that survived and internal audit reports. Reconstruction sounds like a lot, but lawmakers sitting in that room dismissed any notion that an office cannot be audited due to loss of papers.

My field is governed by a rule known as 3-2-1. Every piece of information you cannot afford to lose should have three copies, two kinds of storage, and one of them should be in another place altogether. It is not smart, and it is not novel, but this is exactly why every serious laboratory follows it without a thought. The rule assumes that the building will be destroyed, but does not bother speculating how.

Nepal followed this rule in one place, and it saved us. The Integrated Data Management Centre is located in Singha Durbar. While the fires ravaged other buildings around it, the centre came through unharmed, and its recovery site in Hetauda was never threatened. “The country would have gone blank,” said Manish Bhattarai, who runs that centre. He was not overstating. This building stores the information of Nepal Rastra Bank, the Home Ministry and police databases, company registry, Nagarik App and websites of all 753 local governments.

The same logic saved the land records. An estimate suggests that a million land documents burned in those two days, but people can still reclaim what belongs to them thanks to the existence of this information in the central system. Investment Board Nepal lost its own servers and hard disks in that fire, but it managed to preserve its files because they were stored at that centre and not in its own building.

The Supreme Court had no such arrangement. Basic details of the cases, such as party names and case numbers, were kept digitally, but the files themselves were paper-based. Roughly 20,000 pending case files and a far greater number of those with verdicts issued were burned. For several months, the court has been restoring this information by publishing notices urging litigants and their lawyers to come with photocopies of their files. Over 17,000 were restored by July. The real backup, it turns out, was hiding in photocopy shops outside the courthouse gates.

This is the thing that worries me. In the budget, a sovereign AI compute centre was announced, tentatively in Syuchatar, and the purchase of thousands of processors to operate it. I was arguing for it, and I still do. But no model is as good as the records it relies upon. Two days before this announcement, The Kathmandu Post reported that government servers were malfunctioning all over the country and that a single software breakdown took land revenue offices offline in all 77 districts. Most government data centres’ servers are seven or eight years old and have already reached the point where nobody can support them anymore. We plan to compute on the data we have no idea how to save.

During the same hearing, Finance Minister Swarnim Wagle promised the government will digitise government records and follow any instruction issued by the committee. Nobody offered a deadline. Nobody asked who will audit it. There is still no rule requiring every ordinary district office, ward office or school to store a copy of its records in another place.

The usual objection to this idea is the cost. Half of it is legitimate. Digitising millions of pages is a very slow and expensive process, as the Supreme Court discovered for itself this year. Holding a second copy of information already digitised is not. Storing it costs a bit more now than it used to, because of the current worldwide rush into AI which pushed memory prices sharply up. It is nothing compared to the cost of importing processors.

Underneath all of this lurks the question of what people get away with. Once the records of 179 public bodies disappear, the proof of any questionable information they contained disappears with them. I am not suggesting that someone set the building on fire to hide a ledger. I am saying that we created a state in which such an excuse becomes permanently available.

There will be speeches about rebuilding next month. It is easy to buy some furniture. Nobody said anything about the srestha in the backroom, and until someone does it, the next fire will cost us the same as this one.