Leapfrogging to satellite internet can transform Nepal’s digital landscape

Policy inertia is denying a child in Mugu the same digital access as the one in Kathmandu.

For decades, Nepal’s development has mainly been a strategy of ‘catching up’, a linear, exhausting struggle to replicate the infrastructure of the West. We measure progress in kilometres of blacktopped road and the sluggish expansion of fibre-optic lines across a vertical landscape designed to reject them. But as a new government settles into Singha Durbar, under a leadership that has promised to break with the inertia of the past, we must ask a simple question: Why are we still climbing a broken ladder when we could leap?