Why Open Source Hardware Matters in a Developing Country Like Nepal

Nepal has a mountainous and highly diverse geography, vulnerable to adverse impacts of ongoing climate change. This creates unique challenges specific to this landlocked high-altitude terrain, such as high frequency of road accidents and topographical disasters boosted in frequency by climate change. Due to a lack of coordinated investment and a conducive corporate business environment, a continued reliance on end-to-end imported proprietary hardware from profit-driven foreign corporations has persisted in order to implement technological systems to safeguard the community, flora, and fauna from the adverse impacts of disastrous phenomenon. This has created an irregular and sparse distribution of such socially and scientifically beneficial technological implementations driven by unaffordable and impractical costs. 

Thus, we posit the implementation and encouragement of Open-Source Hardware as a framework to develop and implement culturally, geographically, and socially relevant technological solutions, to optimize technological sovereignty, local innovation ecosystem, and the beneficial impact of such life-affirming and safeguarding technology by maximizing such technology’s ubiquity. Our conjecture is that open-source hardware enables Nepali engineers, makers, students, and scientists to adapt, manufacture, and maintain solutions suited to local conditions. As a proof of concept of the larger paradigm shift, we demonstrate an IoT-based blind curve safety system developed through open-source principles using low-cost microcontrollers, sensors, and wireless communication to improve detection of approaching vehicles, as a measure to warn and prevent road-traffic accidents in blind curves. Blind curves, quite common in mountainous highways of Nepal, are high-risk zones for traffic accidents resulting in loss of lives and infrastructure and property destruction. Such blind-curve detection systems cost little to build, are easy to implement/maintain, and relevant.

 With this example, we want to reaffirm the huge scope that open-source hardware can have to improve the quality of life with such relevant innovations and implementations. However, challenges still remain in terms of normalizing the culture of making-building with open-source hardware due to supply-chain issues, inadequate regulatory policies, and availability/accessibility of necessary tools. We argue that open-source hardware cannot just be a cost saving mechanism, but instead a system for inclusive, decentralized, democratic and Nepal-relevant technological development. We encourage integrating Open-Source Hardware into Nepal’s engineering education and innovation ecosystems and public infrastructure strategies.