The Covid-19 pandemic indisputably siloed essential services from general public reach. The SDG did not perform well with reports indicating disproportionate increase in inequalities for women across health, social protection, education, and livelihoods. A journey plan suitcased the aim to randomly assess data legacy system prevalent at the lowest tiers of governance or public administration. The journey required over a week’s rigorous travel to many rural and urban municipalities of Syangja District in Gandaki Province, which watched over the legacy system of Aadhikhola Rural Municipality, Arjun Chaupari Rural Municipality, Besisahar Urban Municipality, Bhirkot Urban Municipality, Fedikhola Rural Municipality, Machapuchare Rural Municipality, Harinas Rural Municipality, and Waling Urban Municipality.

In all provinces, the local governments have devised their data system; however, the exchange of local data except revenue data remains limited due to lack of data inoperability between ward offices and municipality. For instance, the rural or urban municipality does have current records of the business that have been registered into their jurisdiction, while they do not have data of the businesses, which are that are registered in respective ward offices, which also come within their jurisdiction. The biggest challenges lie in lack of political will, culture of data exchange, exclusive citizen engagement, and poor organizational culture that have contributed to missing operational process despite having requisite technical infrastructure.

In recent times, the local government is spending more on data infrastructure through business process outsourcing. However, it is not working on enhancing its base compensation for in-house data experts and application developer. Neither, it is resorting to transparent and rational database management system with peer-to-peer modularity and open APIs capable of serving a specified government domain i.e., municipal office vis-à-vis ward offices. The government still struggles in its ability to assess and remediate data encryption risks and policy violation.