Essay 11 : DELTA Essay Writing Competition
Engineering Entrepreneurship in Nepal
by Kritagya Regmi
Making work of the people easier with creative ideas is done in engineering and monetizing the process turns it to a business, this defines engineering entrepreneurship. Nepal is analogous to a blank paper of a copy as we can write anything on it and it shall flourish. It is beautifully located geographically between two industrial giants. As we all are going through a serious pandemic, the first thing we all must have realized is, we need food to survive and if its production rate is not good enough than no money in the world can buy food that was never produced. So, if next time a pandemic hits, we might not be able survive it.
Our country was renowned for agriculture and its potential some time ago. According to the world bank collection of development indicators, the total agricultural land in Nepal was 28.75% in 2016, and now it is already 2020.According to the latest reports of ‘The Kathmandu Post’, we Nepalese import agro products of worth 215 .50 billion rupees annually. This import bill is five times more than it was five years ago. Thousands of people go abroad daily to earn money and most of them are farmers from remote areas. This results in labour shortage in our own country because we are getting dependent to other nations day by day. If any of the major supplying countries, in any case deny to send supply than we can only imagine what we would face. So, the only option left for us to sustain our country is by adopting smart agriculture method.
Agriculture is not always the same, we need to gradually embrace the changes and new technologies developed. New researches and processes allow us to grow more things in short span than traditional method. I can clearly state that farmers a decade ago didn’t have any idea of GPS, soil scanning, data management and IOT. These techs help us improve our production rate by making precise calculations of different variables used in the field. Today, we don’t have to depend on climate for productions as we can manage for the artificial environment needed according to the products we are growing. For instance, world super powers like USA, Japan, China and many countries nowadays adopt automated vertical farming methods as major source of agricultural products. This allows us to produce five times more than what we used to before. Maximum of the mechanism we use here is automated so we need less labour and lesser technical manpower. We can calculate moisture, humidity, temperature and make the production more efficient. We can monitor the needs of the individual items and adjust their nutrients correspondingly.
Nowadays we have a lot of options in agriculture. These smart and efficient methods like hydroponics, aquaponics, aeroponics, aero farms and many more can be easily set up with less capital involved by every group of people. In a country like Nepal, we can see high possibilities of smart agricultural methods. Since affordability is not an issue in these farming methods so this can also be practiced in a larger scale.
Talking about challenges, we might face problems while convincing people to adopt different farming styles. Living more than two decades in the country like Nepal, I can clearly say that people don’t want to adopt something unless they see some positive results in their locality. If we can create some examples in the society than this issue can be eliminated. According to studies done, farmers face a lot of problem in finding proper market to sell their goods. If the goods have properly met the criteria of international goods standard than by creating a system to properly export the organic materials we produce, we can get rid of this problem also.
We all work for the better future and the future with food crisis is a nightmare. So, first we need to be self-sustainable and focus on other improvements. As engineers are the most creative minds of the country, it’s our responsibility to make the nation secure through innovation.
