LED displays for government offices in Nepal

Where government offices use LED displays

The most common government use is a public information board facing the street or the office courtyard, showing notices, service information and public awareness messages. These replace paper notice boards that fade, get covered over or cannot be read after dark.

Inside, service halls use displays for token numbers, service lists, required documents and opening hours, which reduces the queue of people asking the same questions at the counter. Ministries, departments and agencies with monitoring or coordination functions use LED video walls to show dashboards, maps, camera feeds and video conferences in one view.

Research centres, training institutes and offices with auditoriums also use LED walls in halls for presentations and events. One example from our own work is the National Soil Science Research Centre in Lalitpur, under the Ministry of Agriculture, where we installed a P5 outdoor display of 4 × 2.5 m at 6,000 nits, sealed to IP65.

Outdoor notice boards: what to specify

An outdoor government notice board should be outdoor-rated end to end: 5,000 nits or more, IP65 front and rear, and a pitch chosen from the viewing distance — typically P4–P6 for a courtyard or roadside within twenty metres. Notices are mostly text, and text needs enough pixels to stay legible, so do not choose a coarse pitch purely to save cost.

Automatic brightness control is important for an office board that runs into the evening. Without it, a screen bright enough for midday glares at night and draws complaints from neighbours. Scheduled on and off times keep running costs down and extend component life.

The structure deserves as much attention as the screen. A pole or wall mount must be engineered for wind and earthquake loading, and in many government compounds the building itself needs checking before a heavy cabinet is fixed to it.

Briefing rooms and monitoring walls

For a briefing room or monitoring wall where people sit two to four metres away, a fine pitch of roughly P1.2–P1.9 at low brightness — around 600 nits — is the usual starting point. Control rooms deliberately run darker than shopfronts, because operators look at the wall for hours.

COB fine-pitch panels suit these rooms well: the surface is more robust against knocks and dust, and the image is smooth at close range. Nepal’s first COB LED installation, in 2024, was a P1.5 control room wall for a corporate client in Kathmandu — the same kind of specification suits government operations rooms.

The processing matters as much as the panels. A monitoring wall needs a video processor or controller that can show several sources at once — dashboards, maps, CCTV, video calls — and switch layouts quickly, and it should be specified with redundancy if the room runs continuously.

Writing a specification that works in a tender

A good tender specification describes performance, not a brand: pixel pitch, brightness, IP rating front and rear, refresh rate, viewing angle, warranty and support. Specifying by brand or by a single model number narrows competition and invites challenges; specifying by performance lets several suppliers bid and makes evaluation straightforward.

Ask for what you actually need to evaluate: manufacturer authorisation, product certificates such as CE and RoHS, work completion certificates from similar installations, and a clear statement of warranty and spares support in Nepal. We hold all of these for the lines we supply, and offering them should be routine for any serious bidder.

Procurement rules, thresholds and approval steps are set by public procurement law and your office’s own procedures, and they change. Your procurement unit is the authority on process; the supplier’s job is to give you documents and a specification that make your evaluation easy.

Power, security and continuity

A government display should sit on a protected, earthed supply with surge protection, and critical walls should have a UPS for the control system. Voltage swings and lightning are common causes of failure in Nepal, and they are easier to prevent than to repair.

Treat the content system as part of the office’s IT. A cloud content management system is convenient for notice boards spread across offices, but access should be controlled with named accounts and strong passwords, and some offices prefer a local, offline player for sensitive locations.

Continuity also means spares. LED displays carry a two-year manufacturer warranty, honoured locally, and we hold spares in Kathmandu. Asking bidders where spares are kept and how fast a failed module is replaced is a simple way to separate a supplier from an importer.

Avoiding the common mistakes

The most frequent mistake is buying an indoor-grade or front-only sealed screen for an outdoor location because it appeared cheaper in the tender. It fails in the first monsoon, and the repair is rarely covered.

The second is choosing pitch by budget rather than viewing distance. A board too coarse for its distance makes notices unreadable, and a wall too fine for a large hall wastes money that could have funded better processing or a larger screen.

The third is leaving installation, structure and power out of the scope. A tender that buys panels but not the mounting, cabling and commissioning will need a second procurement to make the screen work. A free site survey before the specification is written avoids all three.

Common questions

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