Ditch the paper

The vision of reducing in-person visits to government offices through the Nagarik App is blurry due to institutional inertia.

Nepal has long pushed for digital governance, aiming to do away with a paper-based bureaucratic system. To achieve this, the Department of Information Technology (DoIT) under the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology developed a flagship platform called Nagarik App for storing official documents—including citizenship, driving license, passport, PAN and voter ID—so citizens would no longer have to carry photocopies, queue at counters, or navigate redundant verification processes. Yet, as highlighted in a recent report in this paper, people are questioning the app’s worth, as they are still forced to carry documents to banks, hospitals and even government offices.