Research and development are complementary. Even for a small project/program it requires background study and information?s beforehand. Many countries in the world have marched ahead in development and that has been possible only through the research. Having good understanding of these things Mahabir Pun the winner of Ramon Magsaysay Award in 2007 for his project to bring wireless Internet to rural Nepal brought about the concept of establishing National Innovation Centre four years back. Pun has registered a non-profit company called Nepal Innovation Centre (NIC) which consists of five board members including him the other members include ex-Minister Rameswor Khanal, the man behind the Chilime Hydropower Project, Dambar Nepali, Pramod Dhakal, senior scientist in Canada and Dinesh Koju from NAST.          They have planned to build a 10MW hydropower plant, and sell electricity worth $6 million a year. That money will be used to service the loan and run the centre sustainably. Pun was seeking help from the government or any other institution from the past four years but the wait wasn?t fruitful. While country like Korea invest 2 to 4% of their GDP for researches it is sad that Nepal government was no help at all. Hence he has appealed to the people for help and has been visting different places and people to share about his vision.
   On 19^th August 2016, he visited our University and we also got the chance to meet this humble and generous person. According to him this centre shall help any person with innovative, concrete ideas that leads to development in four phases that includes funding, mentoring, product development and finally an investor for the research to actually give its outputs. He believes that like every brick is important to build a house, little help from everyone be it in the form of any idea or economically shall be a great help for this cause. I hope that this initiation will be successful providing us NIC,that shall help Nepali scientists to stay in the country and work for the best of the country as sadly there are thousands of  Nepali scientists abroad .

 We had raised total sum of Nrs.34677 from students and Teachers, we have handed over the sum to him. For further information you can connect through the following links:-
1. http://www.nicnepal.org/

2. https://www.facebook.com/mahabir.pun?fref=ts

3. https://www.gofundme.com/nic-nepal

Photo Credit:- Suman Bhattarai,Assistant Professor,Institute of Forestry,Pokhara