Singha Durbar remains hidden behind a green curtain. A red sticker is attached to the main building. The rebuilding project was put out to tender in February. A year later, it has become little more than a wall draped with cloth.
It all started with a registration deadline. On September 4 last year, the Ministry of Communications blocked 26 social media platforms for failing to meet the deadline. Four days later, on Bhadra 23, the streets were filled with people.
Nineteen people were killed on that first day, which the government now commemorates as Gen Z Martyr Day. Oli resigned the following day. Not everyone died in the same way. Some were killed by the police, while most died in the fires that followed. Ten of the victims were prisoners who were shot while attempting to escape. The death toll surpassed 50 within a week and eventually reached 76. Even today, two commissions continue to argue over who gave the orders.
Some decisions taken in the aftermath deserve more credit than anniversary columns have given them. The ban was lifted within a day. Sushila Karki's government withdrew the social media bill from the National Assembly in February, which was no small step for any administration. An election was held in March, and the winning party now holds 182 of the 275 seats in Parliament. Both commissions have completed their work, although the larger report became public only through a leak.
Revised interest rate corridor system introduced
Each of these decisions reversed an earlier one. Lifting a ban costs nothing. Withdrawing a bill requires little more than a signature and an afternoon.
The repairs that require money have been handled differently. According to media reports, government servers are failing across the country, and a software breakdown has left land revenue offices in all 77 districts offline for several weeks. Most servers in government data centres are seven to eight years old and no longer supported. One IT officer posted in Humla installed servers worth Rs 80 million in 14 land revenue offices in the region. Over the next eight to ten years, not a single rupee was spent on maintenance, and the systems have now become obsolete.
The Supreme Court has been struggling with the aftermath of that night. Around 20,000 live case files were destroyed in the fire, while the number of files lost across the judiciary stands at about 933,000. The government has been publishing notices requesting litigants and their lawyers to submit any photocopies they may have. By July, more than 17,000 files had been reconstructed. Consider this: the government's copy of your case file is gone, so the court is asking you to provide yours.
In August, Auditor General Toyam Raya informed the Public Accounts Committee that records belonging to 179 public institutions had been destroyed. As a result, transactions worth around Rs 148 billion could not be audited. There is no rule requiring a district office to maintain backup copies of its records elsewhere.
Money is not really the problem, regardless of what anyone claims. The government is spending around Rs 400 million to reconstruct ministers' residences in Bhaisepati. By comparison, rebuilding the main Singha Durbar building was estimated to cost Rs 150 million. We found two-and-a-half times more money for ministers' houses than for the building from which the country is governed. No persuasion was required.
The problem lies in what the state imagines when it hears the word "digital." It thinks of a bill that must be discussed, reviewed and eventually approved. What it does not think about is the plumbing: servers, licences, backups, trained personnel and systems that must be upgraded regularly, regardless of whether there is a crisis. A minister who withdraws a bill is applauded the same afternoon. Nobody is celebrated for purchasing servers.
My concern is the order of priorities. The budget announced by Swarnim Wagle in May included a sovereign AI compute centre, provisionally planned for Syuchatar, along with the purchase of thousands of processors. I support this ambition and continue to do so. Yet we are preparing to buy some of the most advanced machines on the market while the computers that issue land ownership certificates are dying of old age. A new processor will not save a land revenue office running obsolete software.
So I propose a simple test for next month, when the speeches begin. Can a man in Dipayal enter a land revenue office and leave with his lalpurja without being told that the server is down and asked to return after Dashain? Does that office maintain a backup copy of his records somewhere else in the country? These questions are harder to answer than any announcement made over the past year. That is precisely why nobody has answered them.
The protests began because the government believed it could control the internet by blocking parts of it. That instinct is gone, and rightly so. What remains is the habit of treating the digital state as something to be announced rather than maintained. The curtain will come down before the speeches. The servers behind it will remain the same.
The author is a PhD student in Machine Learning and Bioinformatics at the University of Georgia, Athens, USA.
