Government’s digital services buckle under repeated system failures

Long queues formed outside the Land Reform and Land Revenue Office in Bhaktapur last Thursday, with citizens clutching land ownership certificates and bank documents, hoping to complete their transactions. However, services had barely moved by 9 a.m. as the government's digital system repeatedly failed.

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The system isn’t working.

Frustrated visitors were repeatedly told "The system isn’t working." Many waited for hours, but the system never came back online. Ramesh Parajuli, a resident trying to purchase land, returned after being turned away the previous day. Even when the server briefly operated, no work was completed. Staff eventually advised everyone to return on Monday due to technical issues on Friday.

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I stayed until the office closed. The courtyard was packed with people waiting for service. Even when the server briefly came online for about two hours, nothing got done. Staff eventually told everyone to come back on Monday because there would be no work on Friday due to technical issues.

Parajuli claimed that while the public was informed of system downtime, work appeared to continue inside the office. The disruption was nationwide, affecting offices like the one in Bagbazar, Kathmandu. Advocate Sharmila Parajuli spent four consecutive days trying to update a client's land records, receiving different excuses each day, including power outages and server failures.

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I spent four straight days coming here and still couldn’t get the work done. My time has been wasted, and I still don’t know when it will be completed. How can the government claim it is building a Digital Nepal when the internet doesn’t work, servers keep failing, power cuts interrupt services, and even a simple task takes four days?

The Department of Land Management and Archives acknowledged the problem, stating technical issues affected the Public Access Module. This outage disrupted services like land registration and ownership transfers. A computer officer at the department, Harisharan Thapa, attributed the problem to heavy load at the end of the fiscal year, noting that fixing one issue often reveals another, requiring continuous improvement and monitoring.

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The heavy load at the end of the fiscal year is believed to have caused the problem. A system never has just one issue. When one problem is fixed, another appears. We have to keep improving and monitoring it because technical pr