By Narendra Dhakal

Gorkha, Feb. 24: Federalism was supposed to decentralise the power of Singha Durbar and ensure all the people an access to the centre’s resources and facilities. But the ground reality is that many areas of the country are still deprived of even basic facilities like telecommunication. Such is the case of Chumnubri and Dharche rural municipalities in Gorkha.
“We need high speed internet for our work,” Bhimsen Shrestha, Chief Administrative Officer (CAO) of Chumnubri Gaunpalika stated, “We need constant communication with the authorities and also need to run a special software. But, here we don’t even get a mobile signal so using internet is out of the question.”
The lack of internet means that the residents and officials of both the rural municipalities are forced to travel to the district headquarters for something as basic as sending an email.
Santosh Gurung, chairman of Dharche Gaunpalika, explained the situation, “People complain that we work from the district headquarters but we can’t even make a phone call or send a message from the village.” “How are we expected to work without telecommunication?” he questioned.
These two rural municipalities, along with other local levels of northern Gorkha, have yet to benefit from the government announcement to provide quality internet connections to all the local levels. Subisu Cablenet Pvt. Ltd. was contracted to connect all the local levels of the district but its term expired in December 2019 before it could complete the work. These areas also don’t have access to the wireless internet provided by Mahabir Pun.
“We could have worked from mobile data if Nepal Telecom (NT) gave us a decent network connection, but we don’t even have that,” Gurung said, adding, “The whole country has 4G while we don’t even have 2G.”
Nepal Telecom does have towers in Laprak, Keraunja, Kasigaun and Uhiya but has not brought them into operation saying that they are still in their testing phase, according to Gurung. But Chandra Bahadur Shrestha, chief of NT’s Gorkha branch, said that they were preparing to start 4G services from their towers in the district.
He also claimed that NT had built four new towers at Dharche and was going to build a new tower at Chumnubri. Northern Gorkha does not have cellular access, neither from NT nor from any of the privately-owned companies. Internet access is nearly non-existent due to the weather and topography forcing the people to come to the headquarters for communication.