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ALL For a drop of Water
APR 23 -
The mercury’s soaring to new heights even as experts promise us an ‘above-average’ monsoon. Yet, for residents of Kathmandu, these promises appear to be a mirage, with a parched Valley and water supply that is shrinking day-by-day. Club the long-awaited Melamchi Project’s dream of supplying enough water to every resident of the Valley, and this becomes a city that will soon face a drought, with a dry winter that has led to the hottest April in the last two years.
When it’s so hot, both man and beast need to drink water. Sadly, there isn’t enough water in this Valley for neither, with the water utility being able to supply only one-fourth of the total demand for drinking water.
Thus, people like Shekhar Raj Guragain are forced to queue up for two hours after midnight, all for just one bucket of drinking water. Guragain’s tap, a stone spout constructed by the Malla kings of Patan, is more reliable than the water supply of Kathmandu Upatyaka Khanepani Ltd (KUKL), the water utility. At least water flows from this stone spout in Alokhiti. For others who have to rely on the utility’s supply, it’s a regular story to wake up at irregular hours of the night. And they form the majority.
For most consumers, the sound of water flowing from their taps is welcome. Yet, it is a sound that they are accustomed to only once every four days, as that is the gap in which KUKL is supplying water.
KUKL’s solution to the problem is in the form of the water tankers regularly seen on the streets of the city. It has formed the Department of Tankers, under which 23 trucks ferry 90 tankers of water to various dry areas in the Capital for free. Yet, that is not enough. “We can just meet 30 percent of the total demand on a regular basis this way,” says Surendra Himal, chief of the department.
The demand for water in the Valley has been rising every year because of the increasing migration into the Capital. As of today, it stands at 320 million litres of water per day. The supply: 90 million litres per day.
It was to mitigate this tremendous gap that an ambitious project called the Melamchi Project was initiated in 1998. Twelve years later, the project doesn’t look to be completed any time soon, and the utility last year launched another ‘Pre-Melamchi Project’ to reduce the gap between demand and supply for the time being. However, “in the lack of proper funds, we have been unable to run the Pre-Melamchi project smoothly,” says Tilak Mohan Bhandari, Acting Manager of KUKL. Still, “some works are undergoing.”
The Pre-Melamchi project will add another 55 million litres of water per day to the utility’s supply, but, as Hari Dhakal, chief of Kathmandu Valley Water Management Board says, “The Melamchi Project is the only way to meet the Valley’s water scarcity. We can do nothing till then, except try to manage through underground water sources.”
The Melamchi Project is the holy grail of the Kathmandu resident’s water needs, promising enormous relief, yet it remains a distant dream. The first phase is ‘supposed’ to be completed by 2014, which will provide 170 million litres of water per day, and the whole project should be completed by 2025, which will supply 510 million litres per day.
But questions over its completion on time have been relatively answered: works have been regularly halted due to corruption charges, and obstruction from various fronts.
Dhakal’s answer that groundwater is the only solution as of now to meet the Valley’s water needs seems to have been understood by the residents here. In fact, residents have taken to the idea so much that groundwater levels in the Valley have been decreasing at an astounding rate of 2.5m every year, according to environmentalist Bhushan Tuladhar.
Dhakal’s agency has tracked at least 500 commercial establishments that extract groundwater for their own use, of which only 10 are licensed. This figure excludes the number of households who use deep tubewells to meet their daily requirements.
Yet, it is not only commercial or residential users who are to blame for the depleting water table. KUKL itself extracts 20 percent of its supply through groundwater, while it operates nearly 50 deep tubewells to that purpose.
Finally, one reason why our taps run so weak, or the water supply so limited, is because nearly two-fifths of all water supplied by KUKL goes to waste because of leakages in its century-old pipelines. Which means of the 90 million litres that the utility supplies every day, only 56 million litres actually reaches the consumers. Theft too forms a part of this leakage. Bhandari says he aims to reduce this leakage by at least eight percent this year by repairing the pipelines, but as things go, that looks increasingly difficult.
Thus, a Valley remains thirsty, with leakages, promised projects, depleting underground sources, and temporary measures. With rising temperatures, it will be more difficult in the days to come, and there are fears that a bacterial epidemic may arise due to the use of water from contaminated and polluted sources. Like the Nepali proverb goes, ‘The crow continues to cry itself hoarse, but no one gives a damn.’
Posted on: 2010-04-24 08:27
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