Promising dreams

The Roadmap recommends that the government establish a reliable electronic network in all VDCs with an integrated governmental portal. It envisions a ‘smart city’ to showcase the achievements of the IT revolution; a special  economic zone specialising in IT in the Sanga-Banepa-Panauti-Dhulikhel corridor; thousands of e-village centres all over Nepal equipped with IT volunteers to deliver all public services through the Internet and local networks; every aspect of socio-economic and cultural transactions with e-prefixes: e-agriculture, e-education, e-health, e-tourism, and of course, e-transaction. Hoping to reify every public exchange as virtual, the roadmap sets a course for the government to arrive at your fingertips within 2019. Or so it claims.

One problem with the Roadmap is that it derives these ambitions from equally fantastic documents of the past, namely the 2010 IT Policy and e-Governance Master Plan Consulting Report 2007-2011. Like them, the Roadmap remains a top-down exercise by a few enlightened souls within and around the IT Department. The merchants of Nepal’s IT dream, who are pushing the Roadmap ahead, form an interesting collection of hardware and software sellers and their clientele officials. The first will gain multimillion dollars worth of government contracts or secure thousands of public jobs for dreamy unemployed graduates from the implementation of the Roadmap. And the last will have their share of the pie from public spending on infrastructure and procurement. A small circle of well-meaning officials will have the satisfaction of being the architects of Nepal’s next revolution in good governance.

Alas, these hi-tech merchants are putting up a boring show by buying key public officials instead of courageously entering the chaotic, informal bazaar of resource-scarce, unpredictable buyers. Hence, officials in various ministries, who are already smitten by the wonders of hi-tech toys, are described as being visionary. And the public, who by and large is poor in resources, deficient in skills and lacking in control and command, is often portrayed as habitual in its resistance to the new. Both depictions are false: futurism alone does not always guarantee hallucination-free strides. The public, who already deal with hi-tech dalals in and around passport offices throughout the country, will obviously not want to have yet another cast of IT characters mediating between them and the government.

Digital divides

Another problem with the Roadmap is that its writers are complacent about the eventual reach of information and communication technology (ICT) in Nepal. Thus, behind every shiny statistical indicator of the state ICT regulatory body, if one cares to look, there is a large shadow of exclusion and marginalisation. For instance, out of 272 million Nepalis, 3.3 million have not yet seen any ICT device; 5.4 million do not own a mobile phone; of the 209 million mobile-carrying Nepalis, 120 million do not use the Internet. The mobile-carrying population is indeed increasing by 12 percent, out of which 5 percent remains disconnected from the Internet. Those few who choose to connect mostly use Facebook, as the traffic to and fro the website alone covers 40 percent Internet bandwidth usage in Nepal.

Indicators from the National Telecommunication Authority (NTA) are notoriously imprecise. They are mustered up from the data made available by IT service providers, who are more powerful than the regulatory authority, and who have every reason to inflate their reach and hide their poor quality of service. But even when one assumes them to be true, one simply has to bring up the household-level data of ownership and use of ICT to show the contours of e-exclusion in Nepal. Out of 5.5 million households in the country, around 2.8 million do not have a radio; 5.1 million do not have a computer; and 5.2 million do not have access to the Internet at home, according to the Central Bureau of Statistics. Clearly, the digital divide is more glaring at the household level than the penetration and usage data based on SIM subscription numbers reveal.

The third problem with the Roadmap is that its designers show utterly misplaced confidence in Internet technologies, which acquire a different order of complexity when scaled up. The challenges to maintain a nationwide government network require skills that are extremely difficult to attain, as any engineer working in the maintenance division of the Indian Railways’ IT system would attest. Furthermore, in a nationwide network, security issues acquire an entirely new dimension. Any breakdown will not only render the collapse of the government network but also will have a cascading effect on other commercial, financial and defence networks. Having the latest and most robust firewall alone will not do. The complicated security architecture will demand ingenuity for defending both the system and the defence mechanism.

Security concerns such as these must also be met with a viable mitigation plan. Two equivalents of nuclear-proof cement cellars in Singha Durbar (which is already built) and Chitwan (which is on the cards) called the National Integrated Data Centre will not resolve concerns. Where disasters are frequent, it is wiser to build resilient defence systems and not simply robust ones. The country, which has so far failed to demonstrate its ability to suffer through any national natural disaster, cannot expect to withstand an e-disaster with minimum damage.

Reproducing inequalities

Lastly, the Roadmap drafters have a simplistic view about the various structural constraints to growth in the IT sector. The penetration of the Internet in a population directly correlates with growth in income per person and growth in secondary school enrolment and adult literacy rate. Similarly, the number of the Internet users decreases as the unemployment rate soars and/or employment becomes seasonal and temporary. Latest figures show that Nepal has 6.8 million people living below the poverty line; about 107 million Nepalis are illiterate; half of all women are illiterate; out of a 7.8 million population of the age group 17-29, who are the riders of the mobile revolution in Nepal, 3.1 million earn less than what their skills deserve or are unemployed. These inequalities are bound to reproduce in digital ownership, control and use. The regional disparities between Inarwa and Pyuthan, disparate linguistic competence with respect to English, varying access to livelihood opportunities across genders, castes, classes and age divisions, will all contribute to the formation of the IT landscape in Nepal.

While it may be argued that like all technologies, IT will prove to be a much-needed intervention in altering the existing structural inequalities in Nepal, such an argument will have to produce evidence that contradicts all our past knowledge about how a technology enters and unfolds in the social landscape. A more realistic take in this regard will be to build provisional roadmaps that engage with political, economic and social realities in a more substantive

manner. To begin such an exercise, the merchants of Nepal’s IT dream themselves need to wake up and think as to why Nepal should spend $355 million (2005 figures) in pursuing a dream which, if and when realised, may invite even more of a mess in governance.        

Raj is Research Director at Martin Chautari, Kathmandu