If You Build It, Will They Come? Exploring Narratives That Shape the Internet in Nepal

Abstract

Nepali information and communication technology (ICT) policies, informed by dominant international discourses on internet and ICT for development, have attributed a ‘self-evident’ positive impact to economic growth. Such a conception is inconclusive and hides the underlying socioeconomic inequalities and the barriers they oppose to universal connectivity ambitions. The self-evident discourse overlooks the importance of adjacent infrastructures like electricity, critical for efficient functioning of a ‘digital society’. History has shown Nepal’s eagerness to buy the irrational exuberance of the dot-com era. It also shows policy targets were not based on local evidence and experiences. While the question about when the next bubble will emerge and burst is debatable, the techno-deterministic arguments need to be checked in light of evidence. We offer insights from import trajectories since the drafting of the first IT policy. The proliferation of mobile phones is explored in light of data consumption (i.e., usage) and access during the deadly earthquake in 2015. The evidence clearly highlights the mismatch between connectivity ambitions and socioeconomic realities in a stratified information society. We contend that the self-evident visions of connectivity need to be checked empirically. We call for internet and ICT policies that have a nuanced conceptualisation of access and its gradation.

Long Term Use of Social Networking Sites by Nepali CSOs

“…In Nepal, during the April 2015 earthquake period, a sixty percent of total tweets originated from the then Bagmati zone, the zone that includes the capital city (Pandey and Regmi, 2018), whereas Bagmati zone corresponds to only a fteen percent of total national population. It can be argued that a large disparity exists also in the volume of mobile data consumption across individuals in Nepal (Pandey and Regmi, 2020). The question here is, since equality is one of the implicit objectives of all CSOs, how could one explain the disparity in SNS usage of the CSOs themselves?…”

Digital Divide in the COVID-19 Context: A Case of Nepal

“…However, most of the students who mostly reside in the rural setting and from underprivileged groups remained out of reach of education through the internet. The four-fifths of the population living in rural Nepal have challenges accessing internet services (Pandey & Regmi, 2020). The National ICT Policy 2015 envisions building the foundational groundwork for Digital Nepal (Ministry of Communication and Information Technology, 2015), and the pandemic situation of COVID-19 enforced its execution shortly.…”