Delivering seamless digital governance was one of the Rastriya Swatantra Party’s ambitious election agendas. After winning the election and assuming office in March, it set out a 100-point good governance plan that promised reforms in taxes, healthcare, agriculture and accountability to enable seamless public service delivery. Initially, it upgraded the Hello Sarkar grievance platform to operate 24 hours a day. It introduced paperless processing for passports, citizenship certificates and driving licences through the Nagarik App and cleared the backlog of smart driving licences. The emphasis on technology and digital governance in the reform agenda, along with the actions taken since assuming office in the sector, is commendable. Still, it is not doing enough to resolve the long-standing issues that hinder the country’s ambition for digital governance.

Frequent server crashes, operational bottlenecks and prolonged service outages are forcing people to navigate a complex bureaucratic maze and leave without completing essential administrative work. For instance, the Nepal Rastra Bank requires citizens to obtain a National Identity Card to open bank accounts. The government has a basic obligation to ensure that the platform to apply for it works. Yet the underlying database frequently collapses under peak traffic, creating bottlenecks nationwide. Other services that frequently go down include immigration services, passport issuance, land registration, transport management, licence renewals and tax payments.

The problem has long been ailing the public, but the urgency to tackle it is lacking. Successive governments have failed to make digital platforms work because of flawed planning and a weak system. Once installed, digital technologies require constant investment in maintenance, upgrades, patching and technical expertise and IT professionals, but governments haven’t put in the effort to keep them running, rendering them useless after a few years. Additionally, officials heavily rely on foreign technology firms for critical government systems. While there is nothing wrong with using that expertise, local workers often cannot resolve the problem independently when the system goes down. Procurement committees constantly buying cheap, short-lived systems that require long, bureaucratic delays to maintain is also creating a massive backlog for citizens. Concomitantly, with the focus on purchasing physical assets, software issues, such as their maintenance, are sidelined, leading to security vulnerabilities.

Given the widespread server crashes, it’s high time Nepal overhauls its digital systems. The government cannot continue to disregard maintenance to the point that the system completely breaks down and fails to serve the public. Any serious investment in a digital system must involve maintaining and upgrading it from the outset. The procurement process also warrants reform in line with rapidly changing technology. Moreover, rather than fully depending on foreign expertise, the government must utilise and retain the country’s young talent in the engineering and IT sector to manage critical government systems independently.

This government carries the immense trust of a public eager for reforms, which presents both a great opportunity and a responsibility to address the problems and take digital governance to a better level. It cannot afford to waste this chance.