Policies and Procedures

The Confidentiality of the respondents is guaranteed by article 10 of Statistics Act 2022 on the release of microdata in Nepal. The act states that "any information or details relating to any individual person, family, firm or company, which have been supplied, obtained or prepared shall not be disclosed or published directly except to the Chief Statistics Officer or to any other officer of the office without the written permission of the person or of his or her authorized representative supplying such information or details". The dataset has to be anonymized with removing all direct identifiers (name, address, reference or ID number, telephone number, etc.) before the publication of the data file

Microdata of some surveys and censuses conducted by National Statistics Office (NSO) are accessible to all users for statistical and research purposes only, under the following terms and conditions:

  1. The data and other materials will not be redistributed or sold to other individuals, institutions, or organizations without the written agreement of the National Statistics Office.
  2. The data will be used for statistical and scientific research purposes only. They will be used solely for reporting of aggregated information, and not for investigation of specific individuals or organizations. 
  3. No attempt will be made to re-identify respondents, and no use will be made of the identity of any person or establishment discovered inadvertently. Any such discovery would immediately be reported to the NSO. 
  4. No attempt will be made to produce links among datasets provided by the NSO or among data from the NSO  and other datasets that could identify individuals or organizations.
  5. Any books, articles, conference papers, theses, dissertations, reports, or other publications that employ data obtained from the NSO will cite the source of data in accordance with the Citation Requirement provided with each dataset. 
  6. An electronic copy of all reports and publications based on the requested data will be sent to the NSO.

In micro-datasets are categorized into two groups, according to the microdata availability in NSO, sensitivity of their content and their inherent disclosure risks. That is:

Licensed data file

The Licensed files are semi-anonymized (direct identifiers are removed) data files characterized by a low disclosure risk. The datasets are available to public use, but it needs a signed agreement between the NSO and external trusted users. Licensing agreements are only entered into with bona fide users for research and statistical purposes only. The bona fide users should comply with the conditions set forth in a formal Microdata Access Agreement and are asked to complete a Microdata request form on-line or in NSO premises before being provided with the data set. A minimum fee will be charged to all users according to size of the dataset and user category.

Currently the microdata sets of surveys and censuses published in microdata catalog/NADA are not directly downloadable from the portal. Once the formal procedure of data access is completed the data sets are either received from post, email or on direct visit to NSO premises.

  1. Price list for purchasing NLSS data set: 
  2. Price list for purchasing NLFS data set:
  3. Microdata request form for NLSS data set:
  4. Microdata request form for NLFS data set:
  5. Bank details for purchasing microdata set:
  6. Price list for purchasing other data set:

Data not available type

 The data set grouped in "Data not available" type is mostly not available for the study. Some studies, however, may have micro datasets but the data set are not downloadable. It is mainly because the surveys and censuses in the category are conducted in very past and a complete set of data files are not available in user-friendly format to access.