Down to earth person in a place high in clouds

Where there’s a will there’s a way. At this moment I can recall no other name suitable than Mahabir Pun to bolster the above statement. I first met Mr Pun in 2004 when he was in KEC for a brief presentation. By that time, he had already established wireless connection between his village and nearest city pokhara otherwise after hearing his unending stream of ideas; it would have been much easier to dismiss the disheveled man of forty plus as a hopeless dreamer. What he has done for the villagers of myagdi district is phenomenon and the achievement is testimony of his hope, determination and ingenuity. I was ecstatic and felt truly honored when I knew Mr. Pun bagged 2007 Ramon Magsaysay award for community leadership for connecting his village to global village.

Now, wireless network is expanded to embrace twelve villages – distributing hundreds of computer to local schools, connecting them to internet, which is very uncommon for government school in Nepal. It was all started in 1997 by a simple question from an Australian school child when he came to know about Nangi village through website – How many computers do u have? None, came the reply. The answer prompted the children in Melbourne’s Billanook college to raise money and send four old computers (two 486s, a 386 and a laptop) to the village. Now Himanchal higher secondary school ( in Nangi) has a computer lab of more than dozen computers and video editing equipment. The scenario now, may not be lot different from many Australian schools. The villagers still hang their corn under their shelters and proudly line the pumpkins on roof of their houses built of stones and mud but have access to web to e-market their local products. The other notable changes in myagdi are tele-teaching and tele-medicine. Good teachers in one school now instruct students in others and doctor less villages use Wi-Fi to consult specialist in pokhara.

I remember Mr. Pun repeating “Internet Bhagwan ki jay” many times during presentation and surely he is using it to the same effect to change the fortune of villages and he himself is like demigod for them. He plans to build a college in his village and provide computer courses to students which will open the door to produce computer programmers in the village, and produce software for the big firms around the globe. It may sound like a over ambitious idea to many but Mr. Pun has habit of doing such things and it seems only sky is the limit for Mr. Pun and Myagdi villagers.