E-governance in Nepal: what actually ships

`Government software has different constraints than consumer software. The users are not optional, the network is not fast, and the failure mode is someone not getting a service they are entitled to.

The bandwidth floor

A lot of e-governance work assumes a connection it will not get. Designing for a 3G tail changes real decisions:

• Server-render the critical path; ship interactivity after
• Budget pages in kilobytes, not megabytes
• Make every form survive a dropped connection mid-submit

Identity is the hard part

Authentication is where most of these projects stall. Citizens have inconsistent documentation, names transliterate differently across systems, and duplicate records are the norm rather than the exception.

Every reconciliation rule you add quietly decides who gets locked out. That is a policy decision wearing an engineering costume.

What actually ships

The projects that land share a pattern: narrow scope, one workflow end to end, and an offline fallback that staff genuinely use. The ones that stall try to digitise an entire department at once.`