Policy Storyteller: Turning Nepali Bills into Human Stories with Gemma 4

#devchallenge #gemmachallenge #gemma

Gemma 4 Challenge: Build With Gemma 4 Submission

What I Built

Policy Storyteller helps Nepali citizens understand laws without a law degree.

Pick a bill → get a plain-language brief, three diverse personas (Terai, hill, city — farmer, student, shopkeeper…), each with a day-in-the-life scenario and what becomes riskier / safer → vote on the story. English or नेपाली.

Four bills built in: Social Media Act 2081, IT & Cyber Security 2082, School Education 2080, Privacy Act 2075.

Not legal advice — digital equity for low literacy and patchy 4G.

Demo

Repo: https://github.com/NiranjanNlc/PolicyStoryTeller

Flow: Choose bill → Generate story (~1–2 min) → Explore brief & personas → Vote. Stories cache in localStorage per bill + language.

How I Used Gemma 4

Gemma 4 does everything — no hand-written summaries, no rules engine. A FastAPI backend chains seven focused calls per story:

Step	Gemma 4 outputs
Brief	JSON: summary, who is affected, key points
Personas	3 diverse Nepali composites
Scenarios	2–3 sentences each, NPR & real places
Risks	JSON: riskier / safer lists

Prompts force Nepal context (Nagarpalika, NPR, Dashain, Terai/hill/mountain) and Devanagari Nepali when selected. Pydantic validates JSON; one auto-retry if the model adds markdown fences.

Via OpenRouter (OpenAI-compatible API) — swap model id in .env.

Which Model & Why

Gemma 4 small (2B/4B) — on purpose.

Civic users are on phones and free tiers. Each job is small JSON or a few sentences — not a 31B reasoning marathon. Seven sequential calls already take ~1–2 minutes; small Gemma keeps that affordable, fast enough, and good enough in Nepali. MoE/dense would be overkill; small Gemma is the tool that can run in Nepal, not just about Nepal.

Stack

React + Vite + Tailwind · FastAPI + Pydantic · OpenRouter · no DB (localStorage + file votes)

cd backend && pip install -r requirements.txt && copy .env.example .env
uvicorn main:app --reload --port 8000
cd ../frontend && npm install && npm run dev

Learned (quick)

Retry on bad JSON beats switching to a bigger model.
Tell Gemma who the reader is (“low legal literacy”) — Nepali output improves a lot.
Run calls sequentially on free tier or you hit 429 halfway through a story.