It’s hard for 54-year-old Sher Bahadur Shrestha to come to terms with the loss of his home. The house he built atop a small hillside six years ago in Dhapakhel, of Lalitpur Metropolitan City tumbled down when the land where his house stood slid down following heavy rains last month.

“It was a beautiful place, and we never had any problem with monsoon before. I never imagined something like this would ever happen to me,”said Shrestha. Aware that his house may be damaged, no one was inside that afternoon.

Nearly a dozen other houses near his are at risk and several of them have been severely damaged with cracks.

According to the Dinesh Karki, ward chair of Lalitpur-24, several places in the area suffered from flash floods and about 31 places in the area were pulled down by landslides after incessant rain in the third week of July.

“Who would have thought this could happen inside the Valley itself,” said Shrestha.

But according to urban planning and land development experts, the event is not the first of its kind. Instead, it is another incident revealing the haphazard use of land for urban settlement that doesn’t reckon risk-sensitive planning of land.

After houses were brought down to rubble during the earthquake of 2015, experts pointed out that authorities had faltered in regulating and overseeing land use by the people. An example of it can be the Gongabu neighbourhood, where many tall buildings were damaged in the earthquake costing the lives of many.

A study by National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Resilience (NIED), a research institute based in Japan, highlights that one of the reasons the place was affected the most in the earthquake was because the structures were built atop soft ground inappropriate for load-bearing.

But over the years, the unregulated use of excavators and human activities for building and road constructions without considering its impact on the environment have also made Kathmandu’s land fragile, says Suman Maher Shrestha, a senior urban planner.

“Kathmandu’s urban settlement has violated terms of land use. Houses and private commercial structures have cropped up even in places where land cannot withhold loads,” said Shrestha. “There are houses near floodplain areas, and houses even where only farming can be done.”

The Valley since the early 1990s has undergone rapid changes, and according to a study conducted by GSDRC Helpdesk Research, a US-based research institute, the Kathmandu Valley is one of the fastest-growing urban agglomerations in South Asia that has seen an increase in new homes and buildings.

However, many of these settlements and buildings use land inappropriately without any risk management.

And so every year in monsoon Kathmandu Valley suffers from several floods and landslides. The unchecked and reckless land use in the Valley has increased the severity of the monsoon disasters.

On the same day Shrestha lost his house in Dhapakhel, another landslide was reported at a construction site for a commercial complexat at Tashi Danda in Tokha Municipality, Kathmandu. Two minors were killed when the inclined slope subsided burying a temporary workshop.

“The landslide probably would not have occurred if they had not plotted the land in the area. The heavy rain pushed down the area because they meddled with the soil and unfortunately two lives were lost,” said Gyan Maya Dangol, deputy chief at Tokha Municipality.

Experts believe the Valley’s land use should be monitored even more seriously now since the 2015 earthquake has weakened the tenacity of the Valley’s earth.

“The local government needs to take more responsibility to understand and oversee the soil penetration of residential settlements or any type of land use in their area,” said Shrestha, the urban planner.

The Dhapakhel area was sprawling farmland before urban settlement started in early 2000. It is a relatively new urban settlement that has grown rapidly over the years.

“It is in these fringes that new settlers are moving into these days,” said Shrestha.

Shankar Deula, whose house is now hanging very delicately on the Dhapakhel cliff , remembers greenery as one of the highlights of Dhapakhel when he first settled there a decade ago. “There were a lot of trees at the time,” he says.

Deula’s family of five has also been prohibited from entering their house by the police as it is in the risk of toppling down, like Sher Bahadur Shrestha’s house.

A rapid study, conducted by a team facilitated by Soil Conservation and Watershed Management Office and Kathmandu Valley Development Authority through Nepal Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority after the landslide, reported the land’s vulnerability might have increased with the heavy rainfall and the increased water level in the vicinity’s rivers that cut through the base of the land. Surface water erosion because of improper surface water management and soil quality were mentioned as other reasons for the landslides in the area.

“We also found out that disturbance of human activities such as road construction could have added to the vulnerability besides the settlement being in a slope,” said Bishal KC, an engineer who was part of the study. “And it’s not that we cannot have settlements on sloped land but the management of the land in such areas need to adhere to some specific soil bioengineering mechanisms and in this case, we didn’t see such safety systems.”

According to Bishnu Bhandari, senior watershed management expert, there are particularly two reasons for Kathmandu's landslides, the changing climate that has affected rainfall and the eroding land.

“In recent years, our rainfall pattern has changed, it rains incessantly in a short duration of time and in many areas its force causes landslides. But you also have to understand that Kathmandu’s soil is fragile as it has unstable landscape and so we need to assess the type of land before building structures to prevent disasters,” said Bhandari.

In its report, Nepal Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority has also suggested building embankments and gabion retaining walls, a retaining wall made with stones that is tied together with wire to support the slope of the hill. It also suggests constructing check dams to lower the speed of concentrated water flows and implementing bio-engineering measures to rebuild the area.

However, these solutions should have been part of a pre-urban settlement planning, said Shrestha, the urban planner. “Had these solutions been a part of the development of the area the recent disaster could have been averted,” he said.

But one of the terminal challenges of the growing urban settlement is the people’s disinterest in understanding the use of land. Many urbanites building houses and buildings are not aware of seismic safety and have very little idea about how improper drainage systems and soil quality can affect a building.

“Unless people are aware and the government takes the necessary steps to implement these requirements, we will continue to put people’s lives at risk,” said Shrestha.

Meanwhile for Sher Bahadur Shrestha and Shankar Deula, the recent event in Dhapakhel has only made their circumstances even more vulnerable amid the coronavirus pandemic. With no solutions forthcoming, they are just trying to endure their reality.

“It’s an unfortunate event that we didn’t see it coming. Life was good when we settled there but now I can only say, my life’s whole hardwork has crashed down,” said Sher Bahadur Shrestha who is now living at a rented flat in Pulchowk.