Bikalpa Gyan Tatha Bikas Kendra began as an eighteen months program for young indigenous Tamang women. It was a response to the urgent need that indigenous children and young women were always denied of basic education. Because of extreme poverty, no access to any development programs, cultural barriers and a notion that girls should not be educated, many children in the rural as well as the outskirts of Kathmandu were and are still denied education. Many children were outside the main education system. The children and the youths because of poverty work to make their living and to support their family. Bikalpa began as an alternative for those children and young women to be able to learn and earn and still be able to fulfilling their dream of learning to read and write.
Bikalpa began by offering young indigenous women literacy classes, skills trainings for a total of eighteen months and made them confident to take care of their own life and their family back in their villages. The children were assisted even to carry out their own micro business making them economically independent and recognizable as an important family member. Believing in Chinese saying:
I hear, I forget,
I see, I remember,
I do, I understand,
And to accelerate the learning, by doing practically five learning centers were created.