Hello World! - Tech For Nepal

Namaste! Glad you’re here. My name is Sumit, and this is Tech For Nepal.

I started this project because I want to contribute to my country through the skills I actually have: research, engineering, writing, and long-form technical work. I had been thinking about a project like this for a while, but September 8 and 9 of 2025 turned it from an idea into a deadline.

Those days left me with a simple question: if I care about Nepal, what am I prepared to do for it? I read papers, write code, train models, and document what I learn. That is the lane where I can do serious work and contribute, so that is where I decided to begin.

The atmosphere in the country also feels different now. In the parliamentary election held on March 5, 2026, the Rastriya Swatantra Party won 182 of 275 seats in the House of Representatives, and this result put Balendra Shah on track to lead the next government. I had originally created a barebones of this project website a couple of months ago, and I (inconsistenly) did my research on what the landscape of technology and research in Nepal is like. And now, I have a much clearer vision of how I can contribute.

What Tech For Nepal Is

Tech For Nepal is a public home for the kind of work I want to see more of: careful research, useful engineering, accessible writing, and collaboration anchored to Nepal.

The first serious workstream I’ve conjured up is research and development in the NLP sector for Nepali and other languages spoken in our region. That is where I see a clear gap between what exists and what we need. It is also where I can contribute most directly, so I thought why not.

The larger mission is wider than just one research track. I want this space to connect researchers, engineers, students, writers, and anyone else who wants to build or contribute to useful things for Nepal. Some of that work will look like open-source software or open-source models. Some of it will look like technical notes, public writing, project coordination, or a place to share unfinished ideas before they disappear.

This project is still early. Some directions are firm, some are provisional, and a few will change once the work becomes more concrete. I want that uncertainty to stay visible.

What We Want To Build First

The first batch of work is R&D heavy and is concentrated around language technology. These are the tracks I want to push forward first:

Nepali-friendly tokenization. Tokenization shapes cost, context efficiency, and downstream model behavior. I want to benchmark how existing approaches handle Nepali and then work toward a better tokenizer.
Corpus and data curation. A lot of available Nepali text is narrow in source and style. I want to build cleaner datasets, audit them for domain coverage, and be explicit about what kind of Nepali they represent.
Evaluation and benchmarks. I want evaluation suites that ask useful questions about honorifics, register, bilingual retention, and instruction-following. If a model improves, I want to show where and how.
Open-source Nepali language models. The earlier work should lead to actual artifacts: tokenizers, corpora, benchmarks, and eventually models that can serve as public infrastructure.

I expect this roadmap to evolve as the project picks up more contributors and more constraints from the real world.

What I Want This Website To Reflect

I want this website to reflect the actual shape of the work we are doing, and so it will be a mix of formats:

Founder notes when direction changes or when we need to explain why we are moving a certain way.
Research logs that show what we are testing, where we are stuck, and what we have learned from failed approaches.
Technical explainers for readers who want the substance without having to read every paper or repository issue.
Community writing from people thinking seriously about technology, science, education, culture, governance, and social change in Nepal.

and so on.

I also expect to write about politics or public events when they change the context around our work. Technology sits inside institutions, language policy, and public life. When those things shift, we have to respond to them honestly.

How To Join In

I am doing this alone for now. It works as a starting point, but more passionate and skilled people will make this project better. If you care about research, engineering, writing, design, language, or helping people shape it, I would love to hear from you.

The best next step is the get involved page. You can also join our Discord server or email namaste@techfornepal.com.

We have a lot of work to do, and I want to begin properly.