DEVELOPMENT-NEPAL: Water Woes Give Residents Sleepless Nights

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Surendra Phuyal

KATHMANDU, Feb 4 2004 (IPS) - People normally go to bed early during winter here in the Nepalese capital. But not Bimala Sharma, who lives in the Bhotebahal neighbourhood. On most nights, she remains awake. The 33-year-old mother of two children stays alert until midnight and, sometimes, into the wee hours of the morning.

People normally go to bed early during winter here in the Nepalese capital. But not Bimala Sharma, who lives in the Bhotebahal neighbourhood. On most nights, she remains awake. The 33-year-old mother of two children stays alert until midnight and, sometimes, into the wee hours of the morning.

As soon as the tap in the basement of her old-fashioned five-storied house starts running – and other women in the dark and dingy apartment building start making noises – she rushes downstairs from her fourth-floor apartment, two water pails dangling on her left and right.

All that pain to fetch some water. "If I am lucky then I get two, but most of the time I get only one bucketful (of water)" the plump women says as she yawns and opens the lid of a huge plastic bucket in her kitchen and peeks in to check her water stock.

"What we collect in two nights is hardly enough for drinking and cleaning. For washing, we go to our relatives’ houses in other parts of the city,” she adds.

She is not alone. Hundreds of thousands of households in the city of over 1.5 million people have to go through similar ordeal every night – and day.

The Nepal Water Supply Corp (NWSC), the state-owned water utility, supplies water to these neighbourhoods every alternate day or night, meaning homemakers like Sharma get the supplies once in every 48 hours.

This is due to the scarcity of drinking water in the rapidly growing city whose annual population growth rate, according to the Census 2000, stands at a whopping 6.2 percent.

The booming capital, which has seen a massive influx of internal refugees displaced by an eight-year-old insurgency in recent years, needs 180 million litres of water daily (MLD), according to NWSC.

But the utility has been able to distribute much less than the actual demand by tapping water from local ground water and sub-surface water resources; that is, 140 MLD during the wet and rainy seasons, and 90 MLD during the dry season.

These days, there is only 100 MLD water in the system, according to NWSC – which means a shortfall of 80 MLD.

"More houses and slums are coming up in the (Kathmandu) valley, and the drinking water demand is growing, too," says Narendra Man Pradhan, deputy director at NWSC. "We need to add 10 MLD of water into the system every year. But that’s not always possible. "

Adding that much water into the water supply system of the capital city should not be a big problem in a country that sits right on the slopes or foothills of the mighty Himalayas, the largest storehouse of freshwater resources.

But the government is running dangerously low on resources, say officials.

Taking that reality into account, a consortium of bilateral and multilateral donors came forward a few years ago to help Nepal’s government address the water woes of the 650-sq km valley and are funding a multi-million dollar water project, called the Melamchi Water Supply Project.

When completed, the river diversion project would divert 170 MLD of water from the Melamchi river in Sindhupalchok district, which lies north-east of the valley, into the water-scarce valley. The Manila-based Asian Development Bank (AsDB) has supported the 464 million U.S. dollar project right from the beginning.

The other donor partners are the Japan Bank of International Cooperation, Norwegian Development Agency, Swedish International Development Agency, Nordic Development Fund, Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries, the Japanese government and, needless to say, the government of Nepal.

The project took off in early 2001, but the progress on the site has not been very satisfactory, concede officials at the Melamchi Water Supply Board, a government body responsible for the commissioning of the project.

Access roads totalling 50 kilometres need to be constructed before the project’s crucial component – the 27-km tunnel diversion and intake construction – can begin.

But construction has been very slow. "The contractor is not performing very satisfactorily," says Madan Shankar Shrestha, deputy director at the Board. "So we are trying our best to convince the company (Hanil-Koneco, a Nepalese Korean joint venture) that it should complete the construction of the access roads before coming summer."

The project was initially scheduled to come on line by 2007, but has now been pushed back to 2009.

Given the pace of the work on the site it might be delayed further, says the board’s Shrestha. But he adds, "the board is doing its best to meet the construction schedules and complete it on time".

But in Kathmandu, time seems to be running out in efforts to increase the supply of fresh water – even as 40 percent of current supply is lost due to leakage.

Desperate residents are looking for new sources of drinking water such as tapping groundwater resources, buying tanker-supplied water and even rainwater harvesting.

"It’s been ages since officials and leaders talked about bringing Melamchi (water) into the city," says Chandra Bahadur Shrestha, a resident of Baneshwor neighbourhood, as he supervises plumbers fitting a shallow-tube well on his house premises. "I don’t think Melamchi will come (any time soon). So I have dug this well. Now I don’t have to worry about water for our daily use."

In many areas in the city, groundwater table has dropped drastically, so tapping groundwater is not always feasible, says Dr Roshan Raj Shrestha of the non-government Environment and Public Health Organisation.

"So the more water NWSC can add into the system, the more households can optimise water use, the better for the water-scarce city," he says.

Meantime, the government and NWSC have other plans before the Melamchi Water Supply Project is completed. Among these is the Manahara project, which would add additional 20 MLD water from the nearby Manahara River.

The project, supported by a Japanese grant of 16 million dollars, is the largest among all water schemes planned before Melamchi comes on line, according to Pradhan.

"The project will be completed before the end of March,” he says. ”So there should not be any major problem in that area at least for another few years."