Forty-four years ago this year, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) introduced the first ever ‘fourth generation’ British-made computer in Nepal. This was a year before personal computers first appeared in the Nepali markets. The computer was the ICL 2950/10, far from the sleek laptops and tablets of today. It had 64 terminals that could be operated by 64 individuals at the same time and had been brought in from the UK for USD 2 million. 

What did Nepal’s first computer achieve? It was used to process the data from Nepal’s eighth national census in 1981. Even with this then state-of-the-art computer, it still took the team a year and three months to process all the census data. A total of 15,022,839 people were interviewed in this census.

Ten years before this, the Nepal government had used a rented Indian ‘second generation’ mainframe computer for the 7th census data processing in 1971. Processing the data from this census took around one year, eight months, and fifteen days. Before Nepal’s ‘computer decade’, for instance in 1961, census data processing used to take around 5 to 6 years.

UNDP established the foundation for Nepal’s journey toward digitalization and data-driven governance adding to work efficiency, speed and accuracy. The ICL 2950/10 computer used for the eight census was an updated version with keyboard-based inputs and a screen. Additionally, UNDP also provided computer training for government officials who had to go abroad themselves to obtain computer knowledge, skills and training. This contributed to building the capacity and institutionalization of the Nepal Computer Center (NCC) which was established for national data processing and computer training in 1973 as an Electronic Data Processing Center under Nepal’s Central Bureau of Statistics.

Since then, UNDP has continued to play a significant role in Nepal’s information technology evolution, modern service delivery and innovation, inclusive and e-governance strengthening, ethical data use, and evidence-based policymaking.