Starting today, the taps in Kathmandu Valley could be gushing with water again. After a gap of over six months, the Melamchi Drinking Water Project is all set to resume regular supply. In June 2023, the project had stopped supplying water to the Valley, citing potential damage to its main tunnel from monsoon floods. The water supply was supposed to be halted for two months, but the disruption continued for much longer, forcing valley dwellers to hit the streets. There is nothing we can do about the unpredictable rains and landslides, including in the Melamchi area of Sindhupalchok district. There was flooding on June 15, 2021 in the upper reaches of the Melamchi river’s catchment, followed by a similar event on August 1, 2021. The origins of these events can be traced back to the 7.8-magnitude 2015 Gorkha Earthquake that increased the geological fragility of the catchment and its susceptibility to land instabilities. Again, given the growing unpredictability of weather patterns owing to climate change and the country’s seismic vulnerability, these kinds of events are both inevitable and unpredictable.

Yet these “natural” causes are not the only reasons for the suffering of the valley residents. Even if the water supply had to be halted for a while because of these natural calamities, each time, normal supply could have been restored much earlier than they did. For instance, after the June 2023 stoppage, there was more flooding in August which damaged the project’s headworks and access roads. In light of the new damages, the previous repair contract needed to be revised, and the contractor paid extra for it. Yet the payment was delayed for months. In addition, even the suppliers of an earlier contractor started obstructing repairs, as they too had not been paid. Even when people are under an acute crisis, Nepal’s slow government machinery refuses to pick up pace. As a more long-term solution, an Asian Development Bank report later suggested relocating the headworks to an area with a lower risk of devastating hazards. This, says the report, is vital as “extreme geomorphological and hydrological processes in the catchment… make it impossible to control all the landslides, floods, and debris flows that threaten the current location of the headworks.” The suggestion was to build new headworks 500-600 metres above the current location.

The relocation of headworks would be a big step towards finding a more permanent solution. Yet here too there has been a delay in reviewing the design of the proposed headworks. There have been plenty of other excellent suggestions, from the ADB and other water disaster experts, for example, on measures to stabilise the river and control erosion. Yet neither the project operators nor the government at various levels seem serious about finding such long-term solutions. Given this reality, what is likely to happen in the next few days is that Melamchi water will start flowing again and the quest for long-term solutions will again be abandoned. No wonder that the project, which came into operation after nearly 30 years on the drawing board, continues to be cited as an exemplar of Nepal’s botched post-1990 development model.