Nepali student returns home, illuminates rural village

Dristy Shrestha ’11.5 and her father share a dream — to see every house in Nepal lit up with electricity. Shrestha grew up in Kathmandu, the capital and only large city in the small Asian nation.

“My dad is an orphan,” Shrestha said. “He grew up in an orphanage in Kathmandu, but he had really good studies so he was able to get a scholarship to study in America — but he returned to Nepal because he wanted to give back to his society. One way he could see this happening would be to provide the country with electricity.”

Today, her father is an engineer who works primarily with hydropower, the country’s main source of electricity. Providing all of Nepal with power would be no easy task, as a decade-long civil war has essentially stopped the construction of necessary infrastructure and the dramatic topography makes it nearly impossible to run power lines to some regions. While electricity shortages have always been a problem, recent urban growth has exponentially increased the demand in Kathmandu to the point that the country has had to implement scheduled blackouts known as load shedding.

“[In America,] electricity is one of those things that you just have,” Shrestha said. “It is on all the time. At home, it’s a luxury. While in some parts of the country you do get more, in the village, just four bulbs could change people’s lives.”

Shrestha first thought about doing a project in Nepal when she heard about the Davis Projects for Peace Award. Her interest in hydropower made the proposal to implement a small hydro-project that would provide enough electricity for a small village of roughly 30-40 houses a natural fit.

“I wanted to apply and do something in my country,” Shrestha said. “Not just because it’s a developing country, but because, while I know about all these NGOs and INGOs that help, but it’s not often that Nepalis do it themselves.”

After writing the proposal for the project, Shrestha was initially informed that it had been chosen to receive funding only to learn shortly thereafter that the program’s budget had been cut and she would not, in fact, have the money to implement her project. Shrestha spent the remaining weeks at school looking for people to fund the project , going to CSO, ACE and anyone she thought might be able to help finance the project.

“I was really disappointed because we had the proposal and we came so close,” Shrestha said. “I just started looking for people to fund it and at the last minute President [of the College Ronald D.] Liebowitz decided that he had $10,000 he could give us for the project.”

Last May, funds in hand, Shrestha returned to Nepal for the first time since enrolling at Middlebury. The project she returned to execute, Shrestha explained, was just like any other hydropower project. With the help of the villagers, a small dam and power house were built, and a portion of the river had to be re-directed to run through a machine in the power house to generate electricity.

“We did the construction with the help of the villagers,” Shrestha said. “Every house that would benefit from the project had to send someone from their family to help. People didn’t have money but they could participate through their labor.”

The project relied heavily on technical help from Shrestha’s father and a private company, PowerTech Nepal. However, many villagers had been involved before in small hydropower projects in neighboring villages and were also able to contribute their knowledge when difficulties arose.

“It is a small scale project,” Shrestha said. “But these are very popular in Nepal and in the developing world. Many of the villages surrounding ours already had small hydro plants, so some villagers were familiar with how they worked.”

In early July, water flowed through the powerhouse, generating electricity for the first time. “When we first went to the village, people didn’t believe it was going to happen,” Shrestha said. “They had had so many promises but nothing ever actually happened. So when we showed up for the first time they looked stunned and said, like, ‘this small little girl is going to do it?’ They didn’t’ believe me. It makes me feel really good that it actually worked and that there is at least some difference in their lives now.”

When she wrote the initial proposal, Shrestha explained, she tried to think of all the ways that the village would benefit from the project — including a reduced carbon footprint and a decrease in fire danger as houses wouldn’t be burning as much wood — but neither of these advantages helped the villagers as much as their transition away from kerosene.

“The presence of electricity meant that women didn’t have to walk six hours each week to buy kerosene,” Shrestha said. “They saved money and time, and it’s much better for their health.”

Shrestha considers herself extremely lucky to have been able to pursue her studies in the United States, but the fact that her project was carried out by Nepalis makes her very proud.

“Although the funding came from abroad,” Shrestha said, “the work was done by Nepalis. In this project, the money was given to us and I connected the dots, but the dots were already in Nepal — there was already a company to help and villagers contributing anything they could and engineers who wanted to help. Everything was in Nepal except for the money part, and I literally just joined the dots together.”

At the end of the summer, Shrestha found out that she had been awarded a scholarship from the Clinton Foundation to continue her project. She plans to return to Nepal this winter and implement the same project in a different village.

“I am first a Middlebury student,” Shrestha said. “So I haven’t been able to focus as much as I want. Getting the Clinton scholarship is giving me an opportunity replicate and do a better job the second time around.”

The big question, though, is whether or not she will continue to pursue the project further. Currently, she is considering creating a Web site for donations but is unsure whether she will be able to raise enough money to pay for the machinery needed to generate electricity.

“Ultimately, I want to make the standard of life better in any way possible,” Shrestha said. “Electricity and income generation are very important. They save money for kerosene and have health benefits, as well. I hope I can use my resources to help more villages.”

To find out more about the project, visit Shrestha’s illuminating blog, www.microhydropowerpeaceprojectnepal.blogspot.com.