IN the streets of Kathmandu, where drug peddlers and holy men compete with shoeshine boys and rickshaw drivers for the tourist dollar, a new trade is springing up. Sandwiched between the trekking companies and the carpet sellers are a growing number of computer companies, with names like Unique Computing Services and Cosmic Computers. The entrances to their offices may be graced by a cow sleeping on a pile of rubbish, but inside the walls are decorated with advertisements for Microsoft or IBM, and earnest young men sit glued to computer screens.
For the growing number of educated young people in Nepal, computers are the key to a promised land of wealth, freedom and a Western lifestyle. Until recently, the two main professions for educated Nepalese were engineering and medicine. Now, the most popular choice is computing. More than half of the Nepalese students who leave to study abroad go to study computing in India, Russia, or if they are rich enough, the US. In Kathmandu itself, there are over 150 computer companies, selling hardware, software and training.
In January, the Bluestar, one of the hotels built to attract affluent tourists to Kathmandu, opened its doors to Nepal鈥檚 first computer exhibition and conference, organised by the Computer Association of Nepal to show the Nepalese population, and the newly elected United Marxist-Leninist Party government, that software development could be as important as tourism to the Nepalese economy. CAN, which was set up by a group of privately owned Nepalese computer companies, also hopes to drum up support for an information technology park that will bring together Nepalese computer specialists and provide them with vital services such as satellite communication links.
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Nepal is one of the poorest countries in the world. According to Nepalese government estimates for 1993/4 Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is around 拢65 per person, compared with 拢9,450 per person in Britain in 1993. The comparison is a little misleading because around 90 per cent of the Nepalese population lives outside the cash economy. Most are subsistence farmers growing rice and vegetables, and rearing water buffalo on terraces cut into the sides of the low Himalayas.
But the Nepalese population, around 19.4 million in the 1991 census, is growing too rapidly for the land to sustain and alternative ways of earning a living are limited. Nepal has very little in the way of natural resource: there are few accessible minerals and no free land for growing commercial crops for export. There is a small manufacturing industry which produces carpets, jewellery, crafts and clothing designed for Western markets. But manufacturing larger goods for export is difficult because Nepal is landlocked. When it comes to exporting goods, 鈥渨e will always be 10 or 20 per cent more expensive than other countries, and we will always be slow鈥�, says Sanjib Raj Bhandari, chairman of CAN.
Today, tourism is Nepal鈥檚 biggest source of foreign revenue. Walk down any street in Kathmandu and you will find trekking companies, hotels, restaurants selling pizzas and chocolate cake, and tour shops enticing passers-by to ride an elephant through the jungle. But as Bhandari points out: 鈥淭ourism is subject to fluctuations caused by strikes, riots or plane crashes.鈥�
And the past five years have been full of such 鈥渇luctuations鈥�. Many people were put off visiting Nepal after two air crashes in the early 1990s. Nepal also suffered severe flooding in 1993, and reports of anti-government strikes and riots all took their toll. Although the hotel and restaurant owners believe that the tourist trade made a slight recovery in 1994, Bhandari and his contemporaries think that economic dependence on something as volatile as tourism is not a good idea.
CAN members want Nepal to follow the example of India and develop software for companies based in the US and Europe. In 1995, India is expected to make $350 million from software exports, according to the National Association of Software and Services Companies, based in Delhi.
So how can Nepal achieve this goal? Allen Tuladhar, chief executive officer of Unlimited Software in Kathmandu, says: 鈥淚nitially, price would be the main thing we could compete on. At the moment, our price is half the rate [charged by programmers in] India, which is 10 to 20 per cent of what it would cost in the US.鈥� But price is only one of the factors that wins business. The quality of the software or the database work must be good 鈥� and that means having a pool of trained people in the country.
The Nepalese National Computer Centre, originally set up by the Nepalese government, got the ball rolling in the 1980s when it started training schemes for government employees. The NCC was also responsible for designing the curriculum for computer education in schools. The idea is that all pupils between the ages of 15 and 16 in state schools should have access to computers and basic training.
The ideas may be laudable, but there have been a few problems in putting the plans into action. Jonathan Gregson, seconded to Kathmandu University to run its computer department by the United Mission to Nepal, a Christian aid agency, has carried out a survey of computer education in schools. He found that only a few schools have implemented the NCC curriculum, partly because government schools cannot afford to buy computers.
But even if students are lucky enough to get a basic grounding in computing at school, life is not easy for Nepal鈥檚 potential computer scientists. Until last year, the majority of higher education in computing in Nepal centred around how to use popular wordprocessing and spreadsheet packages. If students wanted to study for a computer science degree, they had to study abroad, an option that was too expensive for most.
Private enterprise
The situation has improved slightly. Last August the privately owned Kathmandu University began the country鈥檚 first computer science degree course. The university was set up by staff from Tribhuvan, Nepal鈥檚 main university, who were frustrated with government involvement. It attracted funding from a bizarre collection of donors, including Yamaji Fumiko, a former Japanese film star, the United Mission to Nepal, and local companies.
The stimulus that led to the formation of Kathmandu University 鈥� frustration with government red tape 鈥� has also influenced the way in which the Nepalese computer industry is tackling the problem of finding work, in particular projects tendered by overseas companies. The Nepalese computer industry is essentially a range of small companies which offer a mixture of training, word processing or spreadsheet skills, and some programming expertise. Like the university staff, the Nepalese computing industry wants as little to do with the government as possible. In Nepal in general there is a strong feeling that government involvement in any plan is more of a hindrance than a help.
The NCC has made some attempt to turn Nepal into a centre for programming and database expertise, but the staff have faced an uphill struggle. Last year, the NCC managed to arrange a satellite link to Delhi which would give the centre access to the Internet. The NCC got as far as obtaining an e-mail address and a modem, which it linked to one of the organisation鈥檚 ageing PCs in one of the airy rooms of the government building. But this link was abandoned because satellite time was too expensive. 鈥淲e were linked to Delhi by satellite and through that we could connect to 46 countries, but we can鈥檛 afford to pay for it,鈥� says the NCC鈥檚 head of training, Hari Gopal Shresthra. He is now trying to raise money for the connection from Britain鈥檚 Overseas Development Administration and UNESCO.
Meanwhile, the Royal Nepal Academy of Science and Technology (RONAST) and Bhandari鈥檚 company, Mercantile Office Systems, have connections to the Internet. Bhandari explains that at present they use a modem linked to the existing telephone lines which connects to a computer in northern India, which runs the software needed to link into the Internet. But as anyone who has tried to make a call from Nepal to India will know, the lines are often subject to irritating time delays. These delays can mean that large amounts of data are corrupted in transit, and they make interactive communications impossible.
But Bhandari is optimistic. His company hopes to have a dedicated line for data communications installed by March. This will provide a direct link between the computer at Mercantile Office Systems with a computer in Australia, thereby opening up all the facilities offered by the Internet. Bhandari hopes to be able to cover the cost of the link by allowing other companies to use the connection for a fee.
In the longer term, the privately owned computer companies hope that the planned IT park will provide this kind of service. The original idea for a park dedicated to supporting companies that wanted to write software for export was mooted by the previous government, headed by the Nepali Congress party.
Some land in Dhulihiel, which is about an hour and a half鈥檚 drive from the polluted streets of Kathmandu, is earmarked for the park. For those companies that do not want to relocate, the plan is to provide dedicated communications lines so they can send software and documents to a computer in the park and from there to customers around the world. The park will also provide training and support to companies wanting to export software.
While there is no date set for the IT park to open, Tuladhar believes it will get off the ground within the next two years. The private companies can only push the plans along so far because the Nepalese government controls the country鈥檚 telecommunications network 鈥� and the government is the only organisation that can establish international satellite links.
Even with such links in place, Nepalese computer programmers admit that they still have a long way to go before they can begin to compete with India for software development contracts. One major problem is that they have no track record. One of the few examples of contract work the Nepalese computer industry can cite is that of Data Systems International, which was set up in the early 1980s by an American, Bill Miller. Miller won a contract from NASA, and trained and employed Nepalese people to carry out the work. But the company could not deliver the work on time, and after a few years it went bust. Miller is now back in the US and no longer in touch with the Nepalese computer industry.
More recently some Nepalese software developers have looked to Japan for support. This year Kathmandu will play host to a group of executives from Japanese computer companies who are interested in forming a company in Nepal so that they can use Nepal鈥檚 programming skills. One of the incentives behind this trip is a software package written by three Nepalese computer enthusiasts in their spare time. The package, called Nepal-DB, is a database designed to work with Microsoft鈥檚 best-selling Windows software.
Khusbu Sarkar Shrestha is one of the developers of Nepal-DB. He made the contacts that helped him develop the software while working as a civil engineer in Tokyo. One of his first moves on returning to Nepal was to form a company called the Nepal Team for Software Development with an acquaintance from a Tokyo-based software house called Poetic Systems.
It took Shrestha and his partners a year to develop Nepal-DB, using the C programming language. The package is aimed at small companies with no computer expertise. So far, 200 copies have been sold through three shops in Tokyo that have agreed to promote the software. There is also a version of the software available on the CompuServe network, and 800 people have registered as users.
The story of Nepal-DB offers hope to other young programmers in Nepal. Many of them recognise that if Nepal can compete in the postindustrial age, and harness the resources and enthusiasm of its people, a burgeoning software sector could help to solve many of the country鈥檚 problems. The economic alternatives for the Himalayan kingdom, which is still seen as Shangri-la by many Western visitors, are very few.