Potato to Web: Internet outsourcing in Pakistan’s mountainous north

Spudtacular harvest: Farmers harvesting potatoes in a field next to an e-facility centre (background) in the village of Gulmit. After a few years of going online to find work, the villagers of Gulmit seem content to go back to farming potatoes, relegating use of the Internet to marketing potatoes online.

GULMIT, Pakistan: When a landslide created a huge, turquoise lake that cut them off the world, the farmers of Gulmit were left destitute and unable to sell their potatoes. Their solution: to drag their Himalayan valley in Pakistan’s far north into the Internet age. 

In the village, which is nestled between two peaks approaching 8,000 metres (26,000 feet) high, farmers scrabble to grow the produce as their ancestors did. But just a few metres away Karim Aslam is hammering at a keyboard on a computer connected to a giant satellite dish.