Sun, 22 Dec, 2024

Everybody Should be a Literate in IT Sector, Says Dr. Baburam Bhattarai

By Bidish Acharya

On March 6, Dr. Baburam Bhattarai, the former Prime Minister of Nepal, visited the Deerwalk premises at Sifal, Kathmandu, to deliver a talk on the IT sector and youth. He addressed the crowd of undergraduate students of Deerwalk Institute of Technology and the engineers of Deerwalk Inc. , including the managers on Thursday at the seminar hall. The program took the move when Surendra Adhikari, Campus Chief of Deerwalk Institute of Technology welcomed the speakers. Dr. Rudra Pandey, the Executive Chairman of Deerwalk , began the speech by describing “who we are, what we do, and what we want.” He put forward the fact that Deerwalk had engineers and students from 46 districts of Nepal, 20% of whom were women. Forty percent of almost a quarter of the engineers of Deerwalk having the Master’s degree, did it from foreign institutions. Talking about DWIT , he explained the crux of building the institution was to provide an applied education in Nepal. According to him, no student is restricted to be interested in politics; in fact, it is a great thing to do. He concluded by asking all the students to be politically engaged, and contribute to the country. Dr. Bhattarai focused on the primary reasons why Nepal is being outcast from the speeding pace of the modern world. He said there was a need to launch an ICT literacy campaign, which can eventually help the peoples of Nepal to be literate in the ICT sector. “Everybody should be a literate in IT sector”, he claimed. He cited that he might be a bit hesitated to talk about IT, but is not ignorant about IT industry. He requested all the aspiring students and engineers to work in Nepal and contribute to the betterment of the country. He didn’t cut back the students from going out to the foreign land; instead, he suggested them to go out, study, work, and at last come back to Nepal and deploy the skills to ameliorate the country. He suggested that we have some giving back and we owe something to our country, Nepal. “The destructive phase of the revolution is now complete and the constructive phase has begun,” he spoke on the development process of Nepal. “The perfect combination of vision, determination, and togetherness will help us accomplish that.” “The file transfers take a lot of time in live action, but the computer does it with ease,” he said to exemplify the use of IT in the offices. According to him, E-education, E-governance, E-health, E-tourism, etc… will also be aided to a maximum extent by the versatility of IT sector. Claiming that IT is required everywhere and is the much needed component for a new Nepal, he shared an irony of the vacant post of “Science and IT Ministry” in the Nepal government. Nobody is pulled into that post, just because there’s not a lot of money partitioned to it, claims Dr. Bhattarai. The declaration of Bangalore as an IT town changed the face of India in the field of IT. Relating into it, Dr. Bhattarai believes that the announcement of quite a similar thing could expand the IT sphere of Nepal. He concluded by asking all of the attendees to dream big, not only for the self being, but for the whole country. An interactive Question Answer session helped conclude the program, after which, Dr. Bhattarai joined the managers from the college and the company for tea.