Until the 1950s, Nepal's hereditary rulers held the kingdom in isolation from the rest of the world. Afterwards, the country opened slowly and, until today, many of Nepal's people remain scattered in thousands of rural villages accessible only by footpath. Fewer than half can read. And only one in a hundred receives a newspaper. Altogether, poor soil for journalism! Yet BHARAT KOIRALA, a journalist, has been tilling this stingy soil for nearly forty years. In doing so, he has made journalism a valuable component of his country's belated awakening to modernity.
Born in 1942, KOIRALA was educated at Tribhuvan University in Katmandu and soon became a newspaperman. Rising Nepal, where he began, and its sister Nepali-language Gorakhapatra, were government organs. As KOIRALA rose eventually to lead the state-owned Gorakhapatra publishing house, he practiced "a heavy dose of self-censorship," he admits. Even so, he managed to expand the domain of the press. He encouraged his young reporters to write good stories and shielded them when the results offended someone in power. And he steered them to cover Nepal's economic development and its impact on the rural population. True, such stories were safe, but KOIRALA understood they were also important.
In 1984, KOIRALA established the Nepal Press Institute. In its workshops and courses, he introduced beginning and mid-career journalists not only to new skills but also to professional ethics and standards and to the role of the media as a public watchdog-laying the groundwork for an independent press in years to come. In 1985, he helped form the Nepal Forum for Environmental Journalists, to foster in-depth reporting on the country's environment. KOIRALA linked both of these efforts to affiliated programs abroad, drawing Nepal's rising journalists into important international dialogues.
After leaving Gorakhapatra in 1986, KOIRALA turned his attention to Nepal's rural world, where fully half the districts had no access to national newspapers. To fill the gap, he began mounting huge billboard-style newspapers on walls in rural towns. With funding from the Agricultural Development Bank, these popular "wall newspapers" soon proliferated in Nepal?s remote hill districts.
When a democratic revolution overtook Nepal in 1990, KOIRALA played an important role in the transition to greater press freedom. Still impassioned about bringing information to the rural masses, he encouraged small cities and towns to put up their own newspapers and led the Press Institute to set up branches to train countryside reporters.
Increasingly, however, KOIRALA focused his hopes on radio. Radios, he noted, are cheap. They run on batteries or solar power and their signals can reach where power lines and delivery trucks cannot. Moreover, he says, the radio "transcends literacy." KOIRALA made it his mission to promote locally owned and operated radio stations in rural Nepal. A dozen have succeeded. Meanwhile, leading a consortium of four NGOs, KOIRALA himself launched Sagarmatha, Nepal's first private FM radio station. It offers music and public affairs programming and also takes in trainees -- a true KOIRALA touch.
The urbane KOIRALA works quietly and always in concert with friends and colleagues. He excels at initiating projects and linking them to funders and then, as one friend puts it, letting them "thrive on their own." Today, his impact reaches far and wide, from the country's growing cadre of professional journalists to the wall newspapers posted across the hill districts. His diverse initiatives have a common thread. As Koirala says of community radio stations, they are "helping create a free, independent, and pluralistic media and promoting public debate in our democracy."
In electing BHARAT KOIRALA to receive the 2002 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Journalism, Literature, and Creative Communication Arts, the board of trustees recognizes his developing professional journalism in Nepal and unleashing the democratizing powers of a free media.
