I have been analyzing data from different departments of government for a few weeks now and it’s very infuriating that there is no concept of data in this country. Most of the departments have no more than 2 years of data published in their site and most of them are published behind some reports which are in pdf format and not excel or csv formats. Every data is so garbage that one has to spend hours to extract and clean the data to do even a simple analysis taking no more than few minutes. It feels as if the government do not want citizens to have access to the data as people will start asking questions. or is it just incompetency? How hard can it be. It’s so frustrating.
View on r/IndianStockMarket by ProudNefoli
People have no idea the pain of finally tracking down a document from the Government, then realising its askew by 1 degree, meaning it is a PDF scan so you can’t copy and paste the text for easy referencing *(especially if it is in Nepali).
And these are things like yearly reports on Financial Direct Investments coming into the country, being published by the Finance Ministry.
If anything grinds my gear more than bureaucracy, its inefficient bureaucracy.
Honestly dismantling and rebuilding it from the ground up would probably be more cost efficient in the long run.
I don’t know if you are aware of this site but it aggregates all of Nepal’s government data in one place: https://opendatanepal.com/
Might be useful.
What does Nepal government do so perfectly and professionally that demands a “WOW”?
finally someone who understands my frustation have to rely on united nations world bank and world economic forrums for data
but for macro-economic things nrb regularly publishes report check them out with csv as well
To answer your question: priorities and incompetence. Janata lai ramrari basic sewa dina ta sakeko chhaina, internationally accepted standard format maa data kahaa bata deos? And, whatever data they release is just out of compulsion. Garnai parera or some donor/partner agency ko lead maa or kasailai hero bannu parera matra garchha. They just want to show that they did it, they don’t care about the quality of the work.
Yati samma chha ki…I was trying to perform some data analysis of a department of one of the ministries. My email was must’ve been flying around their network at that time. Some officer in another department of the same ministry emailed me after some 2-3 years inquiring me if I had a completely unrelated set of data from the department I had worked with. I even offered my help pro bono to help him digitize, organize and release the data…but he just swept aside saying there is no policy, will or budget for these activities. These idiots don’t bother to coordinate, communicate or lead with other officers/departments to produce data…they just expect others to do it for them, even if that person is a third person not directly employed by the government.
Not even all US government data are in CSV or XLSX format. Those are in pdf format and are prepared in such a way that bots or normal programming language or package are unable to extract tabular data from it.
Data should be available for general public to read freely but data protection against bots and web scrapers is required.
Exactly!
during the pandemic in 2020, i was soo soo interested in data. i studied a lot of books about nepal’s history and tried to contrast it to the current state. but was shocked to learn about the unavailability of data.
Nepal government office are big time on scanning printed documents before uploading it to their websites. Probably because dinasours run the government office. Even private companies do the same.
Better line, why cant government do everything they are supposed to do properly