Kathmandu, April 27 -- The streets outside the Ncell data centre in Nakhhu, ward 4 of Lalitpur Metropolitan City, are not the kind you linger in. Dust coats everything - your clothes, your face, your notebook - within minutes. Heavy vehicles roll in and out at all hours. Security guards stand at the entrance, stationed between the constant rumble of trucks and the low mechanical hum of the facility behind them.

Inside sit rows of servers, cooling systems, and diesel generators that take over when the grid cannot. The people who live around it in ward 4 and adjacent ward 16 did not know that when it was being built.

"They collected signatures from the households during the ground verification (sarjamin) process, saying they were building...