'Increase budget on ICT sector'

Lalitpur, Apr. 30

Stakeholders in the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sector said that this sector has received a negligible amount of budget for the past several years while a significant portion of it remained unspent owing to government's inefficiency.

Speaking at a Pre-Budget ICT Discourse organised by ICT Foundation Nepal (IFN) in Lalitpur on Thursday, they said that attracting investment in data centres, creating skilled human resources and offering concession in taxes should be the priority of the government.

Manohar Bhattarai, an IT expert, said that a strategy should be formulated to increase the contribution of the ICT to the national Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

"The 100-point roadmap of the government has some ambitious programmes which need enabling legal provisions for their implementation. In the first place, the government needs to create a fully online system for business registration and renewal," he stated.

In order to attract the foreign investors, data centres should to be set up and be included it in its policy and programmes, said Bhattarai, adding that the data centres can be bundled with hydroelectricity production.

Likewise, Gaurav Raj Pandey, president of the NAS-IT, said that the country can achieve the target of US$30 billion IT export in the next one decade but creating required human resource is critical.

"Countries like the Philippines are earning more from IT export than remittances. They have offered several incentives and facilitation to companies coming to the country or entering the sector. Nepal must assure policy stability at least for a decade," he said.

According to Pandey, major focus of IT sector development and promotion should begin with IT education and job creation.

In the past three years, from 2022 to 2025, IT export has doubled to US$1 billion from US$ 515 million.

"We are good in terms of infrastructure for digital payment but Nepali citizens can't use it in India while Indians can pay digitally in Nepal," said Krishna Ram Dhunju, Director of the Nepal Rastra Bank who heads the Central Bank Digital Currency division.

Digital finance is a priority of the central bank as well as the government. There is a need to move ahead in a more coordinate manner. Isolated efforts are insufficient to facilitate the integrated development, according to Dhunju.

Similarly, Adesh Khadka, Joint Secretary at the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology, said that Nepal needs to distinguish the IT industry to address the demands and facilitate through policy creation.

Editor of Taksar magazine Gajendra Budhathoki said that the small amount of budget is also misallocated to the sectors like upgrading the postal services. "Most of the documents of the annual budget are full of lucrative slogans while implementation is not encouraging," he said. "About 40 per cent of the budget remains unspent due to the shortage of skilled human resource in the public institution." 

Published in The Rising Nepal daily on 1 May 2026.