Sajan Ale Magar liked to play football. On Sunday evening, after he arrived home from school, he had lunch and headed straight off to the local football playground in Ranibari, Samakhusi.

The sky was overcast but the sixth-grader wouldn’t have thought a rain was imminent. Before he reached the playground, flash floods at the local stream breached the embankments and swept him away. Ale Magar, 13, remains missing. Search operation from the security agencies and locals has not yielded any result yet. Police said they sent a search team to fix ropes and search for the victim, but given that about eighty percent of the stream-turned-drainage up to the Bishnumati river has been covered, they haven’t been able to reach out to all the nooks.

“We have been relentlessly searching for the boy, but to no avail,” said Deputy Superintendent Angur GC, who is the chief of Police Circle Maharajgunj. This incident has had Samakhusi locals worried, fearing their children might be the next victims.

“Every year, the monsoon brings with it terror for us,” said Chandra Bagale, a 43-year-old father of two sons who runs a small grocery shop near the Samakhushi river. “When it rains, the stream overflows into our settlement. What if our children are the next victims?”

Sunday’s incident is not a singular case in the Kathmandu Valley, which reports deaths and destruction during the monsoon every year. In September 2021, Ujjwal BK, who was 10, fell into an open drainage in Kapan. The boy’s dead body was found in Lalitpur after five days. Prior to that, in July 2017, Binita Phuyal, 12, had died after she fell into an open drain in Tarakeshwar Municipality. That same year, another teenage schoolgirl was swept into a drainage pipe during heavy rain. Miraculously, she survived after the water current pushed her out at another end.

In the Valley, open drainage sewages and uncovered manholes are not anomalies; they’re the norm. And with every monsoon, things get worse, as drainages inundate the roads and conceal those holes, the potential deathtraps.

DSP GC said that more than eighty percent of the streams in Samakhusi are covered with slabs. The banks of the streams are encroached upon, blocking the streams’ right of way, locals say.

In October last year, Kathmandu Metropolitan City City published a notice and asked people to evacuate from the encroached banks of streams in Samakhusi as part of Mayor Balendra Shah’s drive to retrieve encroached open spaces. After the residents ignored the order, the KMC moved forward to demolish the illegally-built structures but the Supreme Court issued an order against it acting on a petition from a local.

“If only they had allowed us to open the slabs and clear encroached areas, the boy could have been saved,” said Raju Nath Pandey, chief of KMC’s city police. “It’s a crime on part of the encroachers who filed a case against us. If anybody kills a person and throws the dead body in the river, it’s hard for us to retrieve the body because the drain has been covered for up to two kilometres until it reaches the Bishnumati river.”

Urban planner Suman Meher Shrestha said that the city’s faulty infrastructure design and rampant encroachment is bound to cost lives and properties. Shrestha added he endorses Mayor Shah’s demolition drive in the encroached-upon lands.

“Also, the local units should work on increasing the size of drainage,” Shrestha said. “If they were not able to solve the problem immediately, they could have kept a danger notice in the accident prone areas like Samakhushi.”

Samakhusi is not the only area in Kathmandu that lacks a proper drainage system. The Kapan area, for instance, was inundated with drain water this year, as it did the years before. The Hanumante river, which originates in the north-west of the Kathmandu Valley, also flooded into the settlements, schools and hospitals in Bhaktapur. Also this year, drains have overflowed in the Kwalkhu area of Patan. Waterlogging in the streets at Kumaripati, Ekantakuna, Lagankhel and Putalisadak remains a perennial problem.

Shrestha, the urban planner, accused the local and federal governments of not being serious about the issue, despite the occurrence of such horrible incidents every year.

“It’s a shame that people are scared of getting swept away by the drainage in the country’s capital,” he said.