creating SMILES....building the nation: The idea

creating SMILES.....building the nation is a dream. A dream for more than 8000 rural villages in Nepal, a dream for more than 27 million nepalese, a dream for a prosperous nation.

The vision for this very idea must have existed in the people's mind from the previous hundreds of years, and another truth is that it is a never ending task........We have to move a long way but as it is said that a journey of thousand miles begins with a single step, it is our start.

Right now the SMILES has its main motto: It's about changing the nation and making a difference......Science, Engineering and Technology combined with the social and economic perspectives of the human lives will indeed create smiles and build the nation......

Let me share with everybody the initial brainstorming, that led us to the start of the project.....

The very first day I got admission in the engineering something came to my mind and that was,

"Can we change the world?".......Being a technical student I have always wanted to get engrossed in the technological panorama, but a study visit to a remote village, Myagdi, in the Himalayan region opened my eyes to a broader view and gave me my first clue. In the village I met a 61 year old villager whom we taught to chat with his son working in an Arabian country. His smiling face when he got in touch with his son struck me hard. This made me interested in how I could work to combine the technology and socio-economic aspects of rural lives in favour of people living in the remote areas. The study visit resulted in a paper “Applications of Wireless Communication in the Upliftment of the Rural Livelihood: A case study of rural villages in the Myagdi district of Nepal”. This paper was successfully presented in a congress in Punjab, India, this year. In the paper what we have concluded is that one can use the present day electronic technology to help the people understand the outer world and change them accordingly giving the rural villages the access to the communication nexus with which we hope a dramatic change will be possible, bringing the people closer and making the world a small place to live.

Crawling of the rural villages’ form the orthodox ways of living and the accompanying poverty confronting the local’s lives towards the prosperity can be sustained with the help of the technology, however basic it may seem, is what I think. I have decided that to reduce the poverty efficiently, various community development projects can be started either with the direct help or some sort of support that the technology brought in the villages can provide. These projects which can also be introduced in the long run as the economic backbone to maintain the technology will open up the plethora of chances for the substantial income.This combination thus established in the rural villages will open up the whole raft of possibilities of the ways with which we can turn the way of living of the local people upside down. This can help in deploying the plans and policies of the government and equip the villagers with the basic rights such as the right to information and the right to education, and beside that, enhancing the earning capacity.

This is how everything started and it has been a long time since 'I' has changed to 'We'.