Using WiFi, Nepal village goes online
19 February 2009
Gaia Vince
Once without a telephone line and in the grip of insurgency,
a remote village in western Nepal stands transformed. A local visionary's
efforts with a home-WiFi kit and solar-powered relay station have e-connected
Nangi with the rest of the region to provide people better education,
healthcare and income.
Nangi, Nepal: There is no road to Nangi. Reaching this
remote mountain village in western Nepal involves a full day's hike up near
vertical paths from the nearest town, Beni. I set off at first light with my
guide, Mahabir Pun, a former teacher from Nangi, and it's not long before my
pack is straining my shoulders and my legs are complaining.
We see no other Westerners, just local people commuting up
and down between villages, and traders carrying impossibly large baskets of
oranges from the higher slopes to the markets below.
As we climb, stopping frequently to rest and admire the view
while snacking on peanuts and sweet oranges, we chat in panting bursts.
Mahabir, something of a celebrity in these parts, despite
his grubby outfit and self-effacing manner, tells me about his lifelong quest to
transform his tribe's villages through the unlikely medium of WiFi.
Nangi village, home to around 800 people, has no telephone
line or cell phone receptivity. Most of its residents are subsistence vegetable
farmers, yak herders, and those who leave to seek their fortune as Gurkha
soldiers.
Mahabir first used a pen and paper in seventh grade, at age
13, and a textbook in eighth grade; he knew he wanted better for himself and
for his village. It took two years of writing daily application letters to universities
and institutes in America before he was finally accepted with full scholarship
on a degree course at the University of Nebraska in Kearney.
Changemaker
"I knew I wanted to change things in our villages. I
wanted to bring an income in and better education and medical facilities,"
he says. Twenty-odd years after arriving in America, he returned to Nangi with
his dream and an equally important folio of contacts.
Our short walk is sprinkled with smiles and
greetings—everyone is glad to see Mahabir. At the far side of a rectangular
patch of mud that serves as the football pitch and general assembly area for
the Pun tribe is a row of low, wooden school huts.
I'm not sure what I was expecting, but this gleaming array
of computers and monitors flanking both long walls is a pretty startling sight.
Children, many barefoot, are hard at work, the only sound the clatter of
keyboards.
More than 40 other remote mountain villages have now been
networked and connected to the internet
"You want to check your email?" Mahabir asks me,
grinning at my surprise. At a school in London, these computer and internet
facilities would be unusual—here, they are astonishing.
At the far end of a line of regular hardware, I spot
something a little different—a couple of wooden boxes housing circuit boards.
"Ah, these are the first computers that I built with
recycled parts donated from old computers, because we couldn't afford new
computers," Mahabir explains, adding that the village built a hydropower
generator in the stream at the bottom of the village to power them.
In 1997 Australian students donated the four adjacent
computers, and people in the US and Europe sent over the rest in subsequent
years.
Reaching the
unconnected
With no telephone line, no way of funding a satellite phone
link, and with the country in the grip of insurgency, Mahabir realised that to
bring 21st-century communications facilities to his village, he would have to
leapfrog the conventional technology route.
In 2001 he wrote to a BBC radio show asking for help in
using the recently developed home-WiFi technology to connect his village to the
internet. Intrigued listeners emailed with advice and offers of assistance.
Backpacking volunteers from around the world smuggled in
wireless equipment from the US and Britain after the Nepalese government banned
its import and use during the insurgency, and suspicious Maoist rebels tried to
destroy it.
By 2003, with all the parts in place, Mahabir had linked
Nangi to its nearest neighbour, Ramche, installed a solar-powered relay station
(TV antennae fixed to a tall tree on a mountain peak) and from there sent the
signal more than 20 kilometers away to Pokhara, which had a cable-optic
connection to Kathmandu, the capital. Nangi was online.
Mahabir says he used a home WiFi kit from America that was
recommended for use within a radius of four meters. "I emailed the company
and told them that I had done 22 kilometers with it," he says. "I was
hoping they might donate some equipment—but they didn't believe what I told
them."
More than 40 other remote mountain villages (60,000 people)
have now been networked and connected to the internet by Mahabir and his stream
of enthusiastic volunteers, and many more are in the pipeline.
The villagers are now able to communicate with people in
other villages and even with their family members abroad by email and using
VOIP (voice over internet protocol) phones, he says. Using the local VOIP
system, they can talk for free within the village network.
Benefits galore
Mahabir explains that email and phones are simply the means
of achieving his goal of providing better education, health facilities, and an
income to villagers.
Telemedicine, via webcam, is now linking village clinics
with a teaching hospital in Kathmandu
It's already working: Mahabir's "teleteaching"
network allows the few good teachers in the region to train others and to
provide direct instruction to students in any connected village school.
Children surfing the net are learning about a whole world of opportunity
outside of their isolated village. And Mahabir is developing an e-library of
educational resources that will be free to use.
The technology has improved commerce, allowing yak farmers
several days' walk away to talk to dealers and their families, and enabling
people to sell everything from buffalo to homemade paper, jams, and honey. And
the villages, many located on beautiful but little-visited trekking routes by
the Annapurna range of mountains, are advertising their facilities for
tourists.
"We are setting up secure credit-card transaction
facilities using the internet so that more tourists will come and provide an
income stream to help finance the education and health projects," Mahabir
says.
Telemedicine, via webcam, is now linking village clinics
with a teaching hospital in Kathmandu. And nurses are getting trained in
reproductive medicine and child care.
Mahabir, the one-man revolutionary, has still more plans to
transform his village including a yak crossbreeding farm in the mountains. In
another of his inspired projects, while all the villages around have been
destroying their sparse forests for firewood, agricultural use, and building,
Mahabir has fostered a substantial nursery from which he plants about 15,000
trees a year in Nangi, and more than 40,000 a year in the surrounding area. It
provides the villagers with firewood and the cattle with fodder.
As Mahabir calls instructions to a guy at the top of a
swaying tree who is working to fix the relay equipment, I realise that
development in these remote rural villages need not be hostage to a failed
government—all it takes is a true visionary with determination.
Source : Seed
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