Bikram Shrestha has never been someone who stays in one place for long. Not physically, and not in his thinking. His career as an internet advocate, policy leader, and banking executive has taken him across Nepal’s most remote landscapes and onto the world’s most influential international stages. And in both settings, the same instinct drives him: to listen, to understand, and to act in service of the communities he encounters.
Travel, for Bikram, is not a perk of professional life. It is an essential part of how he does his work. The insights he brings to global internet governance forums come directly from the villages he has visited in Baglung ,Solukhumbu. The empathy he brings to community connectivity projects is sharpened by the hours he has spent in conference rooms in Wellington, Geneva, and Addis Ababa, understanding how the decisions made in those rooms land on the ground in places far from the institutions that make them. His journeys in both directions, inward into Nepal’s most underserved communities and outward onto the international stage, are what make his advocacy credible, grounded, and genuinely effective.
And running through all of it, connecting the professional and the personal in ways that are distinctly his own, is music. From the rural roads around Hetauda where he played with the Suskera Band to the song albums that carry the emotional residue of a life spent in motion, Bikram’s travels have shaped not only his policy thinking but his creative voice.
Some of the most formative journeys of Bikram’s career have not been to international conferences. They have been into the hills and valleys of rural Nepal, to communities that most internet governance discussions never reach and that most internet infrastructure has not yet served.
His travel to the rural districts of Dolakha and Rukum as part of community Wi-Fi connectivity projects brought him face to face with the reality that statistics about internet access in Nepal can only partially capture. The numbers tell you that roughly half of Nepal’s population remains offline. The villages tell you what that actually means.
In Dolakha, a district that stretches across the hills northeast of Kathmandu and whose communities were among those hardest hit by the 2015 earthquake, Bikram worked alongside local partners to understand the specific infrastructure challenges that make last-mile connectivity so difficult and to support the development of community-driven solutions. The terrain is demanding, the distances are significant, and the communities are often small enough that standard commercial models for internet deployment simply do not work. What does work, as Bikram saw directly, is community ownership, local technical capacity, and the kind of patient, relationship-based engagement that cannot be done remotely.
Rukum, in the mid-western hills of Nepal, presented its own distinct set of challenges and its own distinct community strengths. Here too, Bikram’s travels were not about bringing a prefabricated solution and installing it. They were about listening, understanding the local context, and working with community members to develop connectivity approaches that they could own, maintain, and build on over time.
These journeys into rural Nepal have been among the most important influences on Bikram’s international advocacy. When he speaks at APNIC or ISOC about the importance of community networks, the need for regulatory frameworks that support local connectivity initiatives, and the central role of local partnerships in making rural internet access sustainable, he speaks from the specific, lived experience of having been in those villages, having met those community members, and having seen what connectivity could mean for their lives. That grounding is something no amount of research or secondhand reporting can replicate, and it gives his advocacy a quality of authenticity and specificity that makes a genuine difference in how his contributions land in international forums.
On the International Stage — Representing Nepal to the World
While his travels into rural Nepal have grounded his advocacy in community reality, his international journeys have given that advocacy a platform and a reach that extends far beyond what any single national effort could achieve.
APNIC 58, Wellington, New Zealand — 2024
Wellington brought Bikram to one of the most significant regional internet governance gatherings in the Asia-Pacific calendar. As Chair of the Policy SIG at APNIC, he traveled to New Zealand not as a delegate but as a leader, responsible for guiding some of the most complex and consequential policy discussions in the regional internet community’s agenda.
The centerpiece of his work at APNIC 58 was the Cooperation SIG session on the revision of Internet Coordination Policy 2, a framework that has shaped the global internet registry system for over 25 years. Bikram led the community through nuanced discussions about security, privacy, governance, and the need for inclusive revision processes that reflect the full diversity of the Asia-Pacific region. Wellington was a reminder of why showing up in person matters in internet governance. The conversations that happen in the margins of a conference, the relationships built across a dinner table, the trust that develops when people from different backgrounds spend three days working together on hard problems, these are things that no video call can fully replicate.
ICANN 74, 2022
ICANN 74 brought Bikram to the global internet governance community at a moment when cybersecurity had moved from a technical concern to a central policy priority across the world. His address to the global audience at that meeting focused on the specific cybersecurity threats facing Nepal’s growing digital ecosystem, and he did not frame those threats in abstract terms.
He told the story of a village shopkeeper who nearly lost her entire savings to an internet fraud. That story landed differently than a slide full of threat statistics. It made the stakes human, and it made the case for why global internet governance bodies like ICANN need to take the security needs of developing nations seriously, not as a footnote to their work but as a core part of it. Traveling to ICANN 74 and making that case in person, in the room where the decisions are made, was an act of advocacy that could not have been accomplished from Kathmandu.
Internet Governance Forum, Ethiopia — 2022
The IGF in Ethiopia held particular significance for Bikram. Held on the African continent for the first time in several years, the forum brought together the global internet governance community in a setting that made the challenges of digital inclusion in the developing world impossible to ignore. For Bikram, traveling to Addis Ababa was both a professional commitment and a personal statement about where the internet governance conversation needs to be held and whose voices need to be centered within it.
His participation in the Ethiopia IGF reinforced his conviction that international internet governance forums must do more than acknowledge the existence of the digital divide. They must be structured, located, and designed in ways that actively invite and center the participation of the communities most affected by it. Ethiopia was a powerful reminder that showing up matters, and that the geography of where global discussions happen sends a message about who those discussions are really for.
Music on the Road — The Suskera Band and the Songs of a Traveling Life
Not everything Bikram carries from his travels is expressed in policy papers and conference presentations. Some of it finds its way into music.
Growing up in and around Hetauda, Bikram was part of the Suskera Band, a musical community that played across the region and brought people together through the shared language of song. Those early musical journeys around Hetauda gave him something that his professional travels would later reinforce: the understanding that connection is not only built through systems and infrastructure but through culture, through story, and through the emotional resonance that music creates between people who might otherwise have little in common.
His song album Preeti Ka Geet, released as the second volume in a series that began with Chinari, carries the emotional texture of a life spent in motion. The experiences of traveling through rural Nepal, of meeting communities in Dolakha and Rukum, of crossing continents to sit in rooms where the future of the internet is being decided, all of that finds its way into his music in ways that are difficult to articulate but unmistakable to anyone who has followed his journey.
Music has also served a practical purpose in Bikram’s community work. The ability to connect with people through culture and creativity, rather than only through technical programs and policy advocacy, has made him a more effective and more trusted presence in the communities where he works. People who might be cautious about a technology program from an organization they do not know well respond differently to someone who understands their culture and who has demonstrated that understanding through genuine engagement with local creative traditions.
What Travel Has Taught Him
Across all of his journeys, international and domestic, professional and personal, Bikram has accumulated a set of convictions about the world and about his work that no classroom or research report could have produced.
He has learned that the digital divide is not primarily a technical problem. It is a human one. The barriers that keep communities offline are not mainly about the absence of fiber or the cost of spectrum. They are about trust, about relevance, about whether the internet as it currently exists speaks to people’s lives and reflects their languages and their cultures. Closing that divide requires technical solutions, but it requires human solutions even more.
He has learned that the most important conversations in internet governance rarely happen at the podium. They happen in the hallways, over meals, in the informal exchanges between sessions where relationships are built and ideas are tested and the groundwork for formal collaboration is quietly laid. Showing up in person is not about the speeches. It is about being present for all of the work that happens around them.
He has learned that Nepal has more to offer the international internet governance community than the international community sometimes recognizes. Nepal’s experience with community networks, with multilingual internet access, with last-mile connectivity in challenging terrain, and with building digital literacy in underserved communities is directly relevant to the challenges facing dozens of other developing nations. Part of his work in traveling internationally is ensuring that Nepal’s voice and Nepal’s experience find their proper place in global conversations.
And he has learned that travel, at its best, is a practice of humility. Every village he visits and every international forum he attends teaches him something he did not know before. That willingness to keep learning, to keep moving, and to keep listening is perhaps the most important thing his travels have given him.
Places That Have Shaped His Journey
Hetauda, Makawanpur — Where it all began. The town where Bikram grew up, founded his first ISP at 19, played music with the Suskera Band, and developed the foundational belief that the internet belongs to everyone.
Dolakha District, Nepal — Rural community Wi-Fi projects that grounded his international advocacy in the lived reality of last-mile connectivity challenges in post-earthquake Nepal.
Rukum District, Nepal — Community internet initiatives in the mid-western hills that deepened his understanding of what community ownership and local partnership mean in practice for underserved rural communities.
Wellington, New Zealand — APNIC 58, where he led critical discussions on the revision of ICP-2 as Chair of the Policy SIG, shaping the future of the Asia-Pacific internet governance framework.
ICANN 74, 2022 — Where he brought Nepal’s cybersecurity reality to a global audience through the story of a village shopkeeper and the very human stakes of internet security in developing nations.
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia — The Internet Governance Forum 2022, held on the African continent, where his participation reinforced his commitment to ensuring that global internet governance reflects the priorities and voices of the developing world.
Bikram Shrestha’s travels tell the story of his career more completely than any resume or biography could. They trace the arc of a life that has moved consistently between the local and the global, between the community and the institution, between the technical and the deeply human.
Each journey has added something to his understanding, his advocacy, and his vision for what the internet can be and should be. Each village visit has made his international work more credible. Each international forum has brought back resources, relationships, and perspectives that have strengthened his work at home.
And through all of it, the music continues. A reminder that the most important connections are not made through networks and policies but through the moments when one person truly reaches another, across language and distance and difference, and finds that they share something essential.
That is what travel has given Bikram Shrestha. And that is what he continues to give back, through every journey he takes and every community he serves.