The villages along Nepal’s mid-hills may finally get the kind of mobile signal city dwellers take for granted. Information and Communication Minister Bikram Timilsina told lawmakers on June 17 that expanding reliable telecom to rural, hilly and mountainous areas is now a government priority, with an amendment to the Telecommunications Act in the works and the Rural Telecommunication Development Fund being pushed harder to reach the places carriers have long ignored.
The numbers he laid out suggest the groundwork is already moving. Fibre-to-the-home, which had reached all 77 district headquarters, is now being stretched to every municipality and rural municipality; broadband has arrived at 4,272 health institutions and 5,341 community secondary schools, and Nepal Telecom added 763 new towers and base stations by mid-June, with nearly 1,600 more planned for next year. The ministry has been handed Rs 5.93 billion for the coming fiscal year, most of it for running costs rather than new buildings.
Timilsina also used the session to talk about journalists. He said press freedom would not be curbed, promised action against media houses that underpay their staff, and took a swipe at the practice of party-aligned press unions, calling it out of step with the idea of a free press. Small sums were set aside for fact-checking, investigative fellowships and complaint handling, modest figures, but a signal of where the ministry says it wants to go.