Ashok Chapagain was born in 1965 in Dingla, Nepal. He received his Bachelor of Civil Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in Roorkee in 1985, and his M.Sc. from the IHE in the Netherlands. With a background in hands-on, small-scale irrigation projects in Nepal, and academic research in the Netherlands, Ashok Chapagain here takes a step further into the global dimension of the virtual water trade.