On Thursday afternoon, as the autumn sun beat down on her, Lina Shrestha, a resident of Bagdol in Lalitpur, was busy cleaning her home and its surroundings covered in mud. All the dirt around was the result of the massive floods that lashed many parts of Nepal last week.

The record-breaking rains last week had swelled the Nakkhu river and swamped her house and left the road in front water-logged. When the Post correspondent reached the flooded Bagdol area on Thursday afternoon, the local residents had already cleared the water inside their houses. But they were unable to venture out due to the water-logged road.

“We haven’t even been able to carry out daily activities, let alone send our kids to schools,” said the 37-year-old Shrestha.

Shrestha’s house is near that of the country’s first President Ram Baran Yadav’s. The two and half storied house of Yadav is empty at the moment, Shrestha said.

“We don’t know if the house still belongs to Yadav, but it used to be his,” Shrestha told the Post. “People of this locality have named the street Rastrapati Marga in respect of former President Yadav, but we feel the condition of the road makes a mockery of the name.”

Not only Shrestha, another lady in her 40s also complained about the road condition. “At a time when people are preparing to welcome the Dashain festival, we are busy sweeping debris,” she said.

“The local government had sent an excavator to clean things up but it didn’t completely clean our homes and roads… There is just too much debris for an excavator to clear in a day.”

The local residents the Post talked to said that, more than the relief the government has promised for them, they first want their streets and the surrounding areas to be cleaned up so that they can walk outside their homes, do essential things, and send their children to schools.

To make things worse, the problem of water shortage is also getting worse, locals said.

Lalitpur Metropolitan City Mayor Chiribabu Maharjan admitted that most places in the metropolis are facing a shortage of drinking water.

“The metropolis has only two water tankers which are insufficient to meet everyone’s demands,” Maharjan told the Post. “Despite our efforts, we were unable to manage more water tankers to supply water for the people… By Friday, we will try to get more tankers.”

Shrestha said that she had never seen the violent avatar of the Nakkhu Khola before. When asked about the reason for the flood in her area, Shrestha speculated that the record-breaking rainfall this year had something to do with it. However, when the walls of nearby houses collapsed, it stopped the flow of water, so she assumes the area might have flooded also due to the debris blocking the normal flow of the water.

Not only Bagdol, the road of the new colony made by the nearby Binayak Housing is also not easily commutable.

Seventy-eight-year-old Ram Rana, a local who lives close to the housing, claims that the area is not appropriate for residence purposes. “We were astonished when a housing company started building apartments here,” Rana said.

“All the destruction in the area is due to the increase in water level of Nakkhu Khola,” Rana told the Post. “I had not seen Nakkhu Khola get so violent before last Saturday.”

Mayor Maharjan echoed Rana. He said most houses which were affected due to rains on September 27 and 28 are near the Nakkhudol area. It was the government’s mistake to develop the Nakkhudol area under Nakkhudol Development Project almost a one and half decades ago, Maharjan said.

“The decision to develop the place as a residential area was wrong,” Maharjan told the Post. “Though the flow of the river changed while building the embankment, when it rained heavily the water found its original way, and hence the inundation.”

This is Maharjan’s second term as Lalitpur mayor. After five years of the first term, he has also completed two years of his second. As the mayor, Maharjan is the head of Nakkhudol development project.

When asked why he could not stop the development project during his long stint as Lalitpur chief, he responded that it was beyond his limit.

“If we try to stop the project saying it was based on a wrong concept, a question will arise about what to do with the houses already built there,” Maharjan told the Post. “We alone cannot stop the project.”