Kathmandu Finally Got Tap Water. After a Climate Disaster, It Was

By Emily Schmall and Bhadra Sharma

MELAMCHI, Nepal – It started with a sudden spike in temperature, nine degrees Fahrenheit, around the Himalayan glaciers. Then came the explosion: a torrent of melted ice that hurtled down at the rate of 2.5 million gallons per second, unleashing a landslide of silt that wiped everything in its path.

Ancient trees, fertile fields, houses, power lines, bridges – they were all swallowed up. Five people died. But the flood didn’t just leave this green valley unrecognizable. Its effects rippled tens of miles away to the Nepalese capital Kathmandu, which had been waiting for decades for something that much of the rest of the world takes for granted: clean tap water.

The deluge that devastated the Melamchi River valley in June last year destroyed a project to supply water via pipelines to a city that has relied on public spouts connected to underground aquifers since the sixth century. Started in 1972 and sustained on hundreds of millions of dollars in international loans through political turbulence and changing governments, the project had only been in operation for a few weeks when the main inlet was covered in flood debris.

Water that had finally flowed from domestic taps in Kathmandu, drawing shouts of joy from the rooftops, dried up abruptly. A painful realization soon came: the project had never seriously considered climate change, even as evidence of the risk of glacial melt in the Himalayas. And now it has to go back to the drawing board.

Intended as a symbol of development for Nepal, one of the poorest countries in Asia, the destroyed waterworks instead exposed the wide discrepancy between a sluggish donor-funded megaproject and the rapidly evolving threats of a warming planet.

“I think we were obsessed with getting this thing done,” said Arnaud Cauchois, the head of the Asian Development Bank in Nepal, the project’s main financier.

Melamchi’s lessons could reverberate around the world as development banks and civil engineers evaluate other major projects in the developing world for their ability to withstand the vagaries of climate change, and consider how to hold themselves accountable if they fail.

The idea
Kathmandu is one of the world’s wettest capitals. During the annual monsoon, streams of water flow through the streets and into the swollen Bagmati River.

In the rainy season, residents still use a free network of stone spouts for bathing and washing clothes. In 1895, water arrived via pipelines, but it was only available to the Rana Palaces, where members of the royal family and high-ranking dignitaries lived and worked.

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In the 1970s, it became increasingly clear that Kathmandu needed a modern water supply system. Once a pit stop for mountaineers on their way to Everest or other peaks, with a population mainly working as rice farmers, the town had grown in stature as it found a place at the end of the hippie trail. The sublime scenery, ancient temples and top-notch hashish attracted young visitors from all over the world.

In the decades that followed, Kathmandu’s aquifers became depleted as it grew at breakneck speed to accommodate refugees from conflict, natural disasters and climate change.

King Mahendra, the monarch of Nepal until 1972, had recognized these challenges. His ambition to turn Nepal’s capital into a tourist destination coincided with the so-called era of development, an era of major infrastructure projects funded by the World Bank and other post-war institutions.

There was a “crazy rush to find investment projects everywhere,” said Dipak Gyawali, a water engineer who worked under Mahendra’s successor, King Birendra.

The World Bank approached the government with a plan to bring water from the Melamchi River to Kathmandu through a tunnel. It would work on gravity, so it wouldn’t require great engineering expertise or expensive pumping.

The water would be used to provide cheaper electricity through hydropower, the capital would have abundant drinking water and the Terai, an important agricultural region, would receive free irrigation.

Once construction began, the project would be completed in seven to 10 years. But even the Nepalese government’s modest original goal – to fix the city’s leaking pipes – was not completed for 15 years, according to a study that Mr. Gyawali co-authored for a government commission in 1987.

After the start, the broader water project remained in the idea phase for two decades. When the government’s ten-year war against the Maoist rebels ended in 2006, Nepal’s monarchy had disappeared, leaving a political vacuum and no clear direction for the project.

All the while, money kept pouring in. The price tag of the project reached $464 million. After the World Bank and the Norwegian and Swedish development agencies halted the project, the Asian Development Bank took the lead and approved a loan of about $160 million to the government of Nepal.

“People wanted that big project because it brought money to the country, not just water, that people in government and others could get money from,” said Cheryl Colopy, who wrote about Melamchi in her book “Dirty, Sacred Rivers: Confronting South.” Asia’s Water Crisis.”

According to Nepalese government officials, international bankers and expert observers, corruption has riddled the project from the start. A prime minister who was ousted during the instability of the war years, Sher Bahadur Deuba, and several of his ministers were later charged with corruption in connection with the Melamchi project. (Mr Deuba is now serving his fifth term as Prime Minister.)

In 2014, an Italian company hired to complete the tunnel abandoned the project, accusing Nepalese bureaucrats of pressuring workers for bribes. Finally, a Chinese company, Sinohydro, completed construction in March 2021.

Then disaster struck. Within hours of the tests started that month, a flood forced operations to be halted. They resumed in early April, but water flowed for just six weeks before the more devastating flood and landslide hit.

Now, 50 years after the idea was first launched, and with Nepalese taxpayers still with about $420 million in loans, the government is no closer to providing drinking water to the parched capital.

“We are concerned that if the rainfall is more than usual, this kind of disaster could happen again,” said Rajendra Sharma, a hydrologist and technical adviser to the government on the Melamchi project.

Climate change
When Gaurab KC, an assistant professor of sociology of law, grew up in Kathmandu, the annual monsoons brought a nocturnal chorus of croaking frogs and jasmine-scented air.

But many of the wetlands and paddy fields that absorbed the monsoon rain and replenished the water table have since been paved as the Kathmandu Valley urbanized at one of Asia’s fastest rates, with a population increasing from over half a million in 1991. to more than two million by 2021.

Like most people in Kathmandu, Mr. Gaurab on an elaborate system to collect, collect and buy enough water for his household. He uses two rainwater tanks on the roof for laundry and plumbing. He buys extra supplies from water tankers for washing vegetables and drinks.

Pipe laying for the Melamchi project started years ago in his neighborhood. “It’s like a myth or a story: Melamchi is coming,” said Mr. gaurab.

What did come was climate change. But at the time of the project’s conception, global warming was an almost esoteric concept, and in the years that followed, its effects on the upstream basin were not thoroughly studied.

That didn’t change even when Nepal was hit by a series of natural disasters. In 2008, a river embankment collapsed, and the ensuing floods displaced more than three million people. Four years later, a glacier-fed river in Pokhara, Nepal’s second largest city, overflowed, causing extensive damage. In 2016, a dam in neighboring China containing a glacial lake burst, washing away a hydroelectric project in Nepal.

The last environmental impact assessment for the Melamchi Water Project was conducted in 2000. No one knew that the glaciers and sediment basin above the valley had become unstable after a 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck Kathmandu in 2015.

“This project was designed so long ago,” said Mr. Cauchois of the Asian Development Bank. “Our focus was to get the bloody done.”

The aftermath
On the day of the disaster last year, Sharmila Shrestha was cooking when she received a call from a relative who lived upriver urging her to run. Her family of four managed to escape to higher ground and returned to their home days later after the water receded. Not all their neighbors survived.

Now, on rainy nights, she and her husband, Shyam Krishna, take turns keeping watch, listening to the thundering sound of boulders crashing into the valley.

An early warning system has been installed that sounds a siren if the river reaches a dangerous height. Some residents whose livelihoods have been lost are now paid to collect smaller boulders from the riverbank and stack them in boxes of chicken wire to build a protective wall.

Mrs. Shrestha and Mr. Krishna live with their two children on the top floor of their flood-ravaged home in a once thriving tourist area, where people are a two-hour drive from Kathmandu to the trout-rich river in the valley and brightly colored houses on terraced rice fields.

The watermark is still visible over the stove in their third-floor kitchen.

“My parents keep suggesting that we move,” said Mrs. Shrestha, “but I have a deep attachment to this place.”

The couple built their first house together out of mud and stone. The walls collapsed in the 2015 earthquake, killing their oldest child. They had just finished painting the walls of their new home, built of reinforced concrete, when muddy water hit last year.

“Everyone praised us when I finished the house,” she said. “Now no one comes to visit.”
Courtesy: New York Times