You must all be familiar with Mahabir Pun’s identity and line of work. You’ve come to the right place if you still don’t know anything about him or know very little about him. The most well-known scientist, teacher, and social entrepreneur in Nepal is Mahabir Pun.
For his vast work employing wireless technologies to develop remote areas of the Himalayas, he is well known throughout the world. Learn more about the Nepali hero’s private life, marriage, family, net worth, and medical background.
About Mahabir Pun
Scientist, educator, social entrepreneur, and activist Mahabir Pun is a social activist of Nepal well-known for his considerable work in using wireless technologies to develop off-the-grid parts in the Himalayas. He is recognized as the first development man in the tech and research fields and is the one who brought wireless Internet technology to rural areas of Nepal.
In order to connect local communities in the Himalayas with one another, Mahabir Pun established the Nepal Wireless Networking Project in 2002.
In 2012, Mahabir Pun spearheaded the effort to register a nonprofit company called “Rashtriya Abiskar Kendra,” also known as the National Innovation Center in English. With his contribution of land for the National Innovation Center, Mahabir has gained popularity. Mahabir Pun is also a Ramon Magsaysay Award and Internet Hall of Fame recipient.
Early Life
Born and raised in a small village called Nangi, a mountainous Myagdi district of western Nepal, Mahabir Pun is a well-known scientist, social entrepreneur and activist of Nepal. Mahabir Pun was born on January 22, 1955.
Father Krishna Pun and mother Purbi Pun were not able to provide Mahabir Pun a life he wanted. Therefore, he had to spend his early life helping his family in household works, grazing cattles and sheeps.
Education
The time when his father retired Gurkha, his father took the extraordinary step of investing all the money to his son’s education. Mahabir Pun assisted in his siblings’ and sisters’ schooling for roughly 12 years as a teacher after completing high school while working in four different schools.
After applying to numerous institutions in the UK and the US, he was successful in receiving a partial scholarship to the University of Nebraska at Kearney in 1989. He received his bachelor’s degree in science education from this institution in 1992. 24 years after leaving his hometown as a young child, he returned there after graduating.
He first recognized the fundamental need for sustainable education in Nangi, where he also began to formulate his goal of building a high school that would serve as a model for local academic and economic development.
Pun gave the Himanchal High School a unique focus on computer training and several packages with the ability to generate cash. In 2001, he returned to the University of Nebraska to complete his master’s degree in educational administration.
Marriage
In June 1998, Mahabir Pun married the love of his life Ommaya Pun. His wife did not accompany him to live with his parents in Chitwan. In Nangi, Ommaya Pun finished the ninth grade. Mahabir and Ommaya have a daughter named June Pun. June was born on September 20, 1998 in Pokhara.
Net Worth
As of 2020, Mahabir Pun’s net worth is predicted to be between $1 and $5 million. He derives much of his fortune from many social entrepreneurs, scientists, and teachers, among other things. But he uses most of his wealth in social services.
Contribution
Mahabir Pun returned to his home town of Nangi in the Nepalese Myagdi district in 2001 after receiving his master’s degree in training from the University of Nebraska at Kearney.
He had a dream to provide the children in the remote Himalayan with better educational opportunities. He modernized the village school, turning it into a focal point for neighborhood improvement initiatives as well as a place to receive instruction.
Later, Pun started numerous income-generating activities in his and nearby villages, including yak and rabbit farming, cheese and jam production, a camping operation, and many others, in order to raise money to run the university and provide job opportunities for the residents.
However, Pun had to walk from one hamlet to the next for several hours in order to talk with people because there were no telephones or other contemporary communication tools in that area. That was the time when Mahabir Pun established the Nepal Wireless Networking Project to build a local communication network for using wi-fi technology to connect people in the Himalayan communities.
His first goals were to bring the Internet to isolated schools, advance digital literacy, and raise the bar for instruction. However, because Wi-Fi was still a developing technology in the early 2000s, the goal of establishing a wireless community in the remote Himalayan region was challenging.
Additionally, because of the conflict there between Maoist insurgents and government forces, Nepalese authorities had prohibited the use and importing of WiFi gear. However, despite these difficulties, Mahabir Pun was able to connect 13 mountain communities to the Internet and a Wi-Fi network in 2006.
Since then, he has expanded the community and offerings to more than 175 remote villages in 15 Nepalese districts. These communities now use the Internet for e-learning, e-healthcare, local e-commerce, local dialogues, money transfers, and climate monitoring.
National Innovation Center
In 2012 AD, Mahabir Pun registered the organization “Rashtriya Abishkar Kendra” with the intention of offering non-profit services in the development of innovation. This facility is also known as the National Innovation Center.
Mahabir Pun claims that the primary motivation behind establishing this center was to promote research and development for the benefit of the nation’s economic growth. In this center, new innovations are being researched periodically.
Mahabir is currently running a crowd funding campaign to support the National Innovation Center. Pun and his team intend to build a 10 MW hydroelectric facility with the crowd funding money.
Awards and Recognition
Mahabir Pun has a long list of accomplishments and awards. His massive contribution to his field was the only reason that allowed him to receive so many awards and recognitions. Mahabir Pun was chosen as an Ashoka Fellow by the Ashoka Foundation in 2002, following an announcement/organization by the Global Association of Top Social Entrepreneurs.
He was also given the Social Innovations Award by the Hand of Global Ideas Bank in 2004. According to the Institute for Social Inventions, “the project is helping yak farmers stay in touch, families connect, and, with an expansion into distance learning, youngsters acquire the education,” using an ingenious combination of solar power, tree-based relay systems, and wireless technology.
Additionally, he also received the Magsaysay Award in 2017 for “his pioneering use of wireless computer technology in Nepal, bringing progress to a remote mountain area by connecting his village to the global community,” which is regarded by some as the Asian equivalent of the Nobel Prize.
Similarly, Mahabir Pun also received an honorary doctorate in humane letters from the University of Nebraska in 2007.
Apart from that Mahabir Pun was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame in 2014. In the same year he was awarded Jonathan B. Postel Service Award by the Internet Society in.
Recently, a well-known source, Routine of Nepal Banda (RONB), has reported that Mahabir Pun and the National Innovation Center will receive the “Bhavan Kriti Ratna ” honor and an NRS 1 Crore cash reward for their remarkable contributions to Nepal’s development.
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