In the pouring rain of a wet evening last week, three water tankers were trudging along an uphill road that was made narrower by the roadside parking of private vehicles. Smaller tankers passed by with some difficulty. A larger tanker was stuck, which created a traffic jam. The helper of the driver got down and rang the bell of an adjoining house. The parked SUV apparently belonged to someone else down the lane.

It’s becoming increasingly common to build multi-storeyed buildings with limited parking facilities. Tenants often use the public road for private parking during the night. Sometimes, landlords themselves turn their garages into godowns and park their vehicles outside. This is a description of everyday affairs in my neighbourhood.

Back in the 1980s, the government agency responsible for the design of what was touted as the first properly planned residential area of Kathmandu charged a premium on the price of building plots promising that the new settlement would have better infrastructure than rest of the city. Demand, despite the steep cost, was so high that the authorities had to adopt a draw of lots to allot empty plots.

The Zonal Commissioner assured buyers that wider roads, better water supply, cleaner drains, more stable electricity, greener open spaces, a community centre, a public school, children’s parks for every block, a health centre and round-the-clock security would make the area an attractive place. As it often happens with most official promises, final delivery fell far short of initial promises.

The water supply in Kuleshwar is far worse than many other localities that have organically sprung up all around the Ring Road and beyond. When we moved into the area in the mid-1990s, water supply infrastructure had already begun to collapse. Like most other houses in the vicinity, a tanker once a month was the only option for getting water for daily needs. Back then, the possibility of water from Melamchi, which prime minister Krishna Prasad Bhattarai had boasted “will be enough to wash Kathmandu’s streets clean”, looked real.

We have been paying our minimum water bills every month to retain the connection in the fervent hope that someday water from Melamchi will gush from our pipes. It’s not that I didn’t try, like my neighbours, to get up in the middle of the night, connect a water pump and pray that the existing supply will reach our end of the pipe. It seldom did. Hopes die hard—I am still paying my water bills.

We got a shallow well dug in our backyard in the late-1990s. Throughout the noughties, water from the well was enough to see us through for almost six months beginning with the monsoon in mid-June. In the aftermath of the Gorkha Earthquakes, electricity from solar panels and water from the well made our life slightly more bearable. The well seldom fills up anymore.

Perhaps the rainwater percolation tracts that fed the localised water table of my area was disturbed due to tremors or the subsurface storage had been drained out for deeper foundations of multi-storeyed buildings in the vicinity. Now it functions just as a method rainwater harvesting.

Expected outcomes

Strictly speaking, I or anyone else for that matter, have no right to draw water from underground sources even within the land that we legally possess. Subsurface water routes flow across boundaries and are shared commons. In the past, public wells were for the community as were every natural or artificial channels spouting water at designated spaces for hiti or dhungedhara. Excess groundwater usually flowed to the lower level and emptied into a nearby water body or wetland. Such a system of withdrawal worked well as long as replenishment occurred in a natural manner during seasonal rains.

With the population of Kathmandu Valley ballooning to almost five times within 50 years, the precarious balance of groundwater has been irrevocably disturbed. Some of the reasons are beyond local control. Partly attributable to climate change, periods of downpour during the monsoon are getting shorter and winter rains have become much weaker. After long dry spells, when it rains, it pours and then water rushes downstream. But human interventions in the natural system are largely to blame for dry wells, parched wetlands and groaning rivers.

The water supply from surface sources to the denizens of Kathmandu is awfully inadequate. According to some estimates, the valley gets only a quarter of the water it needs. The rest of he requirement is met through a complex supply chain of deep boreholes, water tankers, shallow wells, stone spouts and even rivers where squatters can be seen digging puddles along sandy banks for household use.

Irrespective of their quality, shallow wells basically recycle rainwater. Stone spouts are often outlets for feeders sourced from watersheds in the uplands. Sources of water for tankers are sometimes suspicious, but likely to be either a river or a borehole that pumps water out of confined aquifers deep down below the ground.

The impact of overuse of shallow wells is clear—over time, the water gets muddy before completely drying out once the monsoon is over. The increasing reliance on boreholes going deep down into the confined aquifers is worrisome. In addition to almost all “housing colonies”, several upscale hotels and restaurants pump out water from deep boreholes with gay abandon. With the rate of withdrawal far exceeding the capacity of replenishment, aquifers below the lakebed that the valley once was are emptying out. Lowered water level, drier wetlands, higher risk of subsidence and gradual death of rivers are some of the unintended consequences to fear.

Remedial measures

The widely held belief that Nepal is rich in water resources is not entirely false, but overuse has made the trope slightly tiresome. Even though rivers originating in Nepal contribute nearly two-thirds of the flow of the mighty Ganga, scarcity of water is rampant in the country. Its households don’t get enough water for daily use, rice paddies remain unirrigated, and a significant portion of electricity consumption is imported from India despite the country boasting of a potential to produce 83,000 megawatts of hydroelectricity with half of it economically and technically feasible. It’s not salinity but sanguinity that makes a line from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner “Water, water, everywhere, Nor any drop to drink …” salient in Nepal.

Every valley in the Mahabharata range, including Kathmandu, were once water bodies that stored water during the rainy season and fed perennial rivers originating in the region. Alternative storage systems that harvest rainwater and recharge aquifers need to be carefully designed to maintain the system.

Artificial groundwater replenishment is a daunting task, but it’s necessary to go beyond the “reduce, reuse and recycle” rhetoric of sustainability and begin with small steps of recharging subsurface water sources. For a start, the ambitious Singh Durbar restructuring project needs to include recharging wells a part of its master plan. In addition to solar panels on the roof, rainwater harvesting needs to be made an integral part of every mass housing and commercial or public building scheme. When the public sector frames policies and takes the lead, the larger public is encouraged to adopt such practices in their everyday life.