About Me

I grew up in a remote mountain village in western Nepal where the Himalayas were not a destination. They were simply life, the terrain you walked, the weather you read, the risk you lived with. Healthcare was scarce. Opportunities were limited. And I watched people around me suffer from conditions that, anywhere else, would have been treated without a second thought. I lost a close relative to a minor infection because no health worker was within reach. That loss did not leave me. It became the question I have spent my life trying to answer: what does it take for knowledge to actually reach the people who need it?

That question took me first to Nepalgunj, where I studied General Medicine as a Health Assistant under CTEVT, learning how geography, inequality, and absent infrastructure combine to create vulnerabilities that policy papers rarely capture but communities live every day. It took me then to a Bachelor in Mountaineering Studies, where I began to understand mountains not only as landscapes but as living systems connected to culture, identity, risk, and livelihood. And it has taken me now into a Master of Science in Mountain and Mountaineering Science, where my research focuses on snow, glaciers, high-altitude ecosystems, and water systems: the foundations on which Himalayan life, agriculture, tourism, and community safety all depend.

Along the way, something else became clear.

Nepal’s global mountaineering reputation is built on the skill, courage, and irreplaceable knowledge of Sherpas and mountain workers, people who read terrain and weather with a precision no instrument fully replicates, and whose judgment has saved lives that no expedition report fully credits. Most of them carry Nepal’s mountaineering legacy without academic recognition, without formal representation in research, and without visibility in the policy conversations that shape their profession and their mountains. That gap is unjust. Closing it, not by importing frameworks from outside but by building legitimate pathways from within, is part of what drives everything I do.

Today I work at the intersection of mountain science, cultural heritage, sustainable tourism, and environmental documentation. My research covers glacier retreat and shifting water systems, high-altitude ecology, the governance failures of Nepal’s tourism industry, and the communities whose knowledge, land, and sacred landscapes sit at the centre of an industry that too often treats them as scenery rather than stakeholders. I approach this work as both a trained academic and a practitioner with field experience across Nepal’s Himalayan corridors from east to west, someone who has mapped pilgrimage routes with GIS tools, documented oral traditions with community elders, and written carrying capacity analyses for destinations that have never had one before.

To support this mission I founded two initiatives.

AMRC, Aidi Media and Research Consultancy, exists to help partners understand Nepal through ethical research, evidence-based insights, and culturally grounded storytelling. It works with municipalities, conservation bodies, expedition operators, and development organisations who need analysis that is rigorous without being extractive, and communicable without being simplified into something unrecognisable.

The Mount Frontier is a digital platform where research, field reporting, and ideas explore the changing face of the Himalayas, a space that takes seriously both the science of what is happening to these mountains and the human meaning of those changes for the communities who live within them.

I believe knowledge should serve people. Not circulate among specialists while the decisions that affect communities are made without it. Not be locked behind institutions while the mountains it describes are degraded season by season. The work I care most about sits at the places where field reality and academic rigour meet, where a carrying capacity calculation reaches a municipal officer before the next festival surge, where a glacier retreat study reaches the community downstream before the next flood season, where a young guide from Bajura or Kalikot earns certification that reflects what he actually knows.

I am always open to meaningful conversations about tourism, environment, development, or the societies that hold all three together, especially when those conversations are grounded in real places and honest questions.

And you are always welcome to Nepal.