huridocs-tech NPL: Nepal Digest - July 15, 1999 (4 Shrawan 2056 BkSm)

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## author     : NEPAL-REQUEST@cs.niu.edu
## date       : 02.08.99
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The Nepal Digest Thurs July 15, 1999: Shrawan 4 2056BS:
Year8 Volume88 Issue2

Date: Tue, 29 Jun 1999 19:10:40 -0400 (EDT)

The following article (forwarded to me by Sagun Karmacharya)
appeared a while back in Internet's hippest, coolest
magazine: www.salon.com ---------- Forwarded message
---------- K @ m a n d u

Sanjib Bhandari may not exactly be the Bill Gates of the
Himalayas. But his cyber-teahouses and other schemes are
pushing Nepal down the "road ahead." BY JEFF GREENWALD

KATHMANDU, Nepal -- Back in the dark ages -- i.e. the 1980s
-- phoning home from Nepal was a major project. I had to
stay up well past midnight, then ride my rented bicycle down
to the Kathmandu Telecommunications Center. There were
endless, baffling forms to fill out. A good read was
essential; connecting to the U.S. via funky trunk lines
could take over an hour. And after all that, half the time
the payoff was a dreaded busy signal, and a long slide back
to square one. Today, the Kathmandu Valley, once the
archetypal South Asian backwater, is wired to the gills.
Satellite dishes yawn amid drying dung patties on the roofs
of Himalayan lodges, the crown prince surfs the Net, and
Radio Nepal -- the Hindu Kingdom's flagship AM station -- is
online in real time, on RealAudio.

But the coup de grace is coming in the next couple of weeks,
when Sanjib Bhandari, founder and CEO of Mercantile Office
Systems (MOS), opens Nepal's first cyber cafe. Called
K@mandu and situated just 50 meters from the high, spiked
gates of the Royal Palace, K@mandu will be the first in a
series of culturally hyper-conscious "Cybermatha teahouses."
The phrase, Bhandari explains, is a play on "Sagarmatha,"
the regional name for Mount Everest. "And they won't be
cyber cafes," he notes, "because in the mountains you
wouldn't drink coffee."

Bhandari, 37, is the dean of a new breed of Nepali
techno-wizards. He has a round face, bowl haircut and easy,
boyish charm. Like Bill Gates, he looks a lot younger than
his age. Further comparisons between the Nepali tycoon and
Microsoft's CEO are inevitable, though, by Bhandari's own
admission, "I probably lack (Gates') killer instinct."
Educated by American Jesuit priests at a private school in
the Kathmandu Valley, Bhandari studied accounting in Bombay
before going to the U.K. for a one-year course in computer
systems. "It was very, very basic," he laughs. Still, the
know-how he brought home was enough to thrust Nepal --
essentially a medieval nation until the 1950s -- into the
information age. He founded MOS in 1985, immediately after
returning to Nepal. He now has 120 employees.

Bhandari decided to open his cyber-teahouses after visiting
similar venues in Singapore and Sweden. It helped that
improved telecom links have recently made such an enterprise
practical in Nepal. But he faced a more intractable foe than
technology: government censorship. "The Communication Act of
Nepal," Bhandari says, "flatly states that no form of
communication can promote violence, sedition, treasonable
acts or immorality -- i.e. sex. Right now the government is
creating policy for Internet businesses and they know full
well that you cannot guarantee -- no matter what technology
you use -- that forbidden things will not come in. So we've
had the buck very conveniently passed back to us. 'We'll
allow you to run the Internet,' they say, 'but you can't do
anything prohibited by the Communications Act.'" Bhandari's
stopgap solution has been to follow Singapore's example.
He'll set up proxy servers, block a few hundred of the Web's
most notorious sites and hope the government credits him for
observing the spirit of the law. "We think that's how it
will be," he says, grinning. "Of course, there could be one
nasty guy who says, 'Oh, I saw a nude woman on a site
through your service, and I'm going to shut you down!'

That's possible.

"Of course," Bhandari adds rapidly. "You can dial up India,
you can dial America, you can dial anywhere, any outside
line, to get access to the Internet. And they're fully aware
of that, too." K@mandu will be launched later this month
with five Internet stations. Two months later, Bhandari will
open a larger teahouse with up to 20 stations. The design
was inspired by the Sherpa teahouses you'd find on a trek
into the Everest region. Like a Sherpa lodge, K@mandu won't
have desks or office chairs. Instead there will be long
tables and benches covered with traditional, loom-woven
carpets.

But is there a market for a cyber-teahouse in such a remote
location? "Initially," says Bhandari, "I thought of tourists
and expats -- people who've gone trekking and have lost
touch with their electronic mailboxes for two or three
weeks. For a cyber buff, an unthinkable situation! But I now
think such people will constitute a very small part of our
clientele. I'll tell you why: We had a computer show here in
January, and we put about a dozen stations at that show.
They were used from the moment the show opened until night
time. All Nepalis.

They downloaded

Film Fare <http://www.filmfare.com/> (an India-based
"Bollywood" fanzine), universities, chat rooms, you name it.
And the average age was less than 20: people who can't
afford an Internet link at home." Ever the entrepreneur,
Bhandari has a number of other projects in the pipeline.
One, already underway, is a "telemedical" service, a
nationwide Net link that would allow doctors in far-flung
health posts to communicate online with specialists at the
major Kathmandu hospitals. Another -- inevitable, perhaps,
though bittersweet -- is a plan to place VSAT (Very Small
Aperture Terminals) links in lodges or teahouses along the
major trekking routes. Such links would provide
around-the-clock connectivity to the MOS server in
Kathmandu, and hence to the world at large. As Nepal gets
about 50,000 trekkers a year, such a service could make a
bundle.

"You could take a laptop with you on the Everest trek, or
into the Annapurnas, and link up from there. It's a
straightforward set-up." With a sigh, Bhandari adds, "The
only obstacle is the governmental permission."

And a formidable obstacle it is. Despite ever-increasing
baud rates at the telecom office, Nepal's bureaucracy creeps
along at a snail's pace. One example? About 10 years ago,
when personal computers first arrived in the Kingdom,
customs officials at the airport didn't know where to list
them. New customs forms have never been printed, so
motherboards, modems and microchips are still being recorded
right where they were in the 1980s: under "animal
husbandry."




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