Bhairab Dai’s shining light

Journalist, environmental activist and pioneer of Nepal’s community radio movement, Bhairab Risal has died at age 97 at a hospital in Kathmandu.

Risal’s journalism career took him from being chief reporter at the national news agency RSS to hosting a regular studio talk on Radio Sagarmatha, Nepal’s first community radio station. He spoke extempore from the studio about everything from plastic pollution to the need to address the concerns of senior citizens.

When not in a newsroom or radio studio, he would be roaming to the remotest parts of the country promoting initiatives to fund schooling for underserved children in Dolakha, or paying for farming families in Humla to install solar lights. He was perhaps the only Nepali journalist who had been to all of Nepal’s 77 districts.

Risal was born in 1927 in the Tikathali village of Bhaktapur, where he lived all his life. While working for the official news agency, he was jailed for criticising the Panchayat system, and kept a diary while in detention which he later published as साधुलाई सुली (Skewered Saint).

Once released from jail, he joined Bhaktapur’s Nepal Workers’ Peasants’ Party in the 1991 parliamentary elections, but lost by only 1,300 votes. It is intriguing to speculate what would have happened to Bhaktapur and Nepal today had he won that election. 

He then turned into an environmental activist and was one of the leading figures in the Nepal Forum of Environmental Journalists (NEFEJ). A guru to many of us younger journalists, Bhairab Dai (as he was fondly known) demanded the same professional high standards and integrity from us that he practiced himself.

Once in 1967, Risal was sent to cover a press conference by visiting UN Secretary General U Thant. This was before recording devices, and not knowing a word of English, Risal transcribed what U Thant said in English into his notebook in phonetic Devnagari and got someone back in the newsroom to translate it into Nepali.    

He told this newspaper in 2000 on his 75^th birthday: “I think it is the company of enthusiastic young journalists that re-energises me all the time. I feel younger every day.” Indeed, Risal was actively lecturing and writing well into his 90s, until his physical health started declining in the past two years. His Radio Sagarmatha interviews with seniors has been published as उहिले बाजेको पालामा (In the Time of our Grandfathers). 

After hearing that Nepal’s medical colleges imported corpses from India, Risal and his wife Sushila willed that their bodies be donated to medical science at Patan Hospital. Although always hard up, Risal would mobilise funds for initiatives like a trust fund for married women students, raising money or for lighting up homes in remote parts of Nepal with solar-powered batteries.

Rsial was deputed to far-western Nepal as an enumerator for the 1961 national census, and wrote about his experience for Nepali Times in 2021. He collected household data in the villages of Gunji, Nabi and Kuti in the disputed Limpiyadhura region on the Indian border that was historically a part of Nepal.

‘The fact that the government of Nepal had actually conducted a census there in 1961 has been cited as irrefutable proof that the territory east of the main channel of the Kali River has always been a part of Nepal,’ Risal wrote.

He launched the Light Up Humla campaign while the Maoist conflict was raging, and when the roadless district in Nepal’s northwestern tip still did not have electricity. The initiative provided solar-powered lights for 7,000 households in a district where people used sooty pine resin lamps for indoor lighting. This caused respiratory infections, and was a major cause of death of babies and children in a district with the highest infant mortality rate in Nepal. 

Risal’s plan was to raise money from 7,000 donors in Nepal and abroad, as he explained to this newspaper: ‘We will ask one Nepali who enjoys the benefits of modern electricity to support another who is living in darkness.’ The plan worked.

I visited Humla with Bhairab Dai in 2006 to report on his solar light campaign. The conflict had just ended, and it was clear that the war had pushed the region’s development behind. An under construction hydropower plant on a tributary of the Karnali was abandoned because of the violence and the district was in darkness. 

In the village of Langduk, a day’s walk from Simkot, Gore Sunwar was emotional to finally meet the man who had brought a lamp to light the darkness of households in his Dalit neighbourhood. 

I remember him holding Bhairab Dai’s hands, and saying: “You are the only one who thought of us poor people, no one else did. My children are in school, they can finish their homework at night and they are not coughing anymore.” 

Later, on the trail back to Simikot, Bhairab Dai told me that raising money was the easy part. The hard part was to make it sustainable with training and backup support.  

Bhairab Risal was a recipient of many awards, including the Jagadamba Shree lifetime achievement prize in service of the Nepali language. 

Read Nepali Times # 299 from 26 May 2006 in PDF here.