Innovation is the buzzword in Nepal after Magsaysay-winner Mahabir Pun was appointed to move the RSP authorities’s newly created Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation.
Formerly head of the National Innovation Centre, Pun served as Education Minister within the interim authorities. He is continuous his unconventional fashion of working by posting movies on social media of cooking inside his workplace in Singha Darbar and sleeping within the central authorities secretariat.
But that’s not the one purpose that these are attention-grabbing instances in Nepal for anybody doing analysis, engaged on progressive concepts, or constructing one thing of their very own inside the nation. Pun has harassed that analysis and innovation ought to immediately influence the every day lives of Nepalis.
After a long time of universities working as diploma factories, rote studying that blunted the minds of discerning college students, corruption driving away expertise, the nation lastly has a authorities eager on making adjustments.
Minister Pun’s appointment has signalled that point is ripe for conversations on issues of innovation. Even past the brand new ministry, there’s a lot to be hopeful about.
There are new centres of studying just like the Madan Bhandari University of Science and Technology in Chitlang, or the University of Nepal guided by management free from political interference and a imaginative and prescient to redefine Nepal’s larger schooling.
There are additionally impartial analysis centres already setting new requirements for what will be performed in Nepal. There is international recognition of Nepali expertise in progressive know-how.
Nepalis are additionally publishing impactful analysis, founding startups, and occupying influential positions in academia and business. These are all encouraging developments, and younger Nepalis are sitting as much as take discover.
For a long time, college students felt trapped between two less-than-ideal selections: stay in Nepal and sacrifice alternatives, or depart the nation and sacrifice the possibility to contribute to the nation’s future.
Increasingly, that now not appears to be the case. Technology has performed a task on this shift. Research collaborations now span continents, entrepreneurs can construct from virtually wherever.
Scientists routinely work throughout borders by digital labs and worldwide partnerships. As a end result, these leaving to check or work abroad have began seeing their departure as an funding in expertise, information, and networks that may finally profit Nepal.
INNOVATIVE INVESTMENT
These traits are what the Ministry of Innovation must put money into. Much of the present dialogue is centred on requires Nepal to lift its expenditure to ranges seen in additional developed economies. Far much less consideration has been paid to a extra fundamental query: does Nepal presently possess the capability to reap returns on that funding?
This capability is constructed by sturdy interactions between establishments, like together with universities that produce high-quality analysis, corporations prepared to commercialise that new information, and insurance policies rewarding experimentation and risk-taking. Without these interactions, authorities funding dangers turning into appropriation with none lasting influence.
Equally central to constructing such capability are people who can query established information and join concepts throughout disciplines. Such expertise are cultivated within the classroom, lengthy earlier than college students enter labs or begin firms.
For a long time, Nepali schooling has continued to prioritise recall over inquiry, and conformity over mould-breaking. The accountability to alter this rests first with the schooling ministry. Educators deserve larger recognition, funding, and alternatives for skilled improvement as a result of they form the nation’s innovation flooring.
The content material they educate, and the way they educate it, determines how future generations strategy drawback fixing. But even when early-stage concepts and novel analysis do emerge, there must be buyers and supporting establishments — similar to enterprise capital corporations and incubators — prepared to again them and have interaction with their inherent threat–reward dynamics.
Given weak personal funding prospects with industrial mandates to help startups, authorities coverage can play a task to form investor-startup interactions.
In South Korea, for instance, this takes the type of focused initiatives similar to its tech incubator program for startups (TIPS), the place a personal enterprise capital agency or accelerator investing in a promising pitch triggers an identical contribution from the federal government.
Yet even with world-class universities, mature industries, aggressive corporations, and one of many highest investments on the earth, Korea continues to grapple with an aversion to entrepreneurial threat and a powerful choice for secure employment.
This is a lesson vital for Nepal. Creating an innovation ecosystem requires researchers and entrepreneurs to really feel prepared to take dangers, pursue unconventional concepts, and fail freely.
In a growing context, specializing in relatable, on a regular basis issues for which options are visibly wanted will be an train in constructing broader social tolerance for such experimentation.
Economists describe these as market-creating improvements: services which might be easy, reasonably priced and accessible sufficient to serve individuals who had been beforehand excluded. Such improvements enhance lives whereas creating industries, producing employment, attracting funding and increasing the productive capability of the financial system itself.
Nepal has no scarcity of areas needing exactly this sort of innovation. We want applied sciences that strengthen agricultural resilience and enhance catastrophe forecasting for communities residing below fixed threat. Affordable water purification techniques, renewable vitality options, and accessible neighborhood well being applied sciences are additionally largely untapped alternatives.
Also wanted are pathways for the Nepali diaspora — scientists, entrepreneurs, and buyers who’ve labored in main innovation ecosystems — to collaborate and construct ventures with out prohibitive bureaucratic boundaries.
For a long time, Nepal’s financial system has depended closely on remittances despatched residence by thousands and thousands of Nepalis working overseas. But in 2025 the annual IT service export surpassed $1 billion, proving there’s a essential mass of worldwide aggressive technical expertise right here. Whether we will transition from an financial system that exports labour to at least one that exports concepts and applied sciences is the query.
Last 12 months’s youth-led political motion introduced Nepal to this inflection level. What ought to come subsequent is a special, however no much less consequential motion to make innovation, analysis and information creation central to the nation’s future.
The authors are undergraduates finding out biomedical engineering on the Hong Kong Polytechnic University.