Saraca Network 2026
| DATE | October 8, 2026 |
The Saraca Network is an enduring cross-border platform for productive exchanges and collaboration among young policy and tech professionals from Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, and India. The 2026 meeting centred on one of the region’s most consequential challenges: collective natural disaster response and management. By bringing together analysts and mentors from the Subcontinent, the Network aims to develop policy solutions collectively and build sustained relationships.
The two sessions on geospatial technologies and tools used regional cases such as Cyclone Ditwah, the Nepal floods, and the 2025 glacial lake outburst that swept away the Friendship Bridge, to introduce open data platforms (Sentinel, OpenStreetMap, FIRMS, and others). It also taught participants to verify any map or AI result for source, date, resolution and gaps before acting, and made the case that cross-border data sharing must happen before the next disaster.
The second session explored a passive monitoring platform that pulls 18 official, satellite and open-model sources for Nepal, Bhutan and Sri Lanka into one dashboard, and labels every data point as observed, forecast or official with its source and timestamp.
An open session on the future of Nepal, Bhutan, and Sri Lanka was held where Nitin Pai was in conversation with Sujeev Shakya, Karma Phuntsho, and Rohan Samarajiva. This was a public event hosted at the Takshashila office.
Shared sessions, meals, and book crawls helped participants from four countries build the informal, trusted relationships that formal data-sharing arrangements often lack.
