Min Kumar Magar and his five-member family have spent sleepless nights for the past couple of days. The family lives at the Paurakhi tole, a flood-prone area, in Thapathali. Incessant rains that continued through Tuesday morning had the whole family worried, including Magar’s eight-year-old daughter Merina, as it did around this time in the previous years. The area, home to as many as 145 families and around 900 people, remained tense as the water level in the nearby Bagmati river kept rising.

“On Tuesday morning, water gushed inside our house,” said Magar, who has been living in the area for the past 18 years. “If the rain had not stopped, our whole settlement would have been swept away.”

He said it was hard for him to console his daughter, sons and wife. “We only had an option to pray to God, because we didn’t have anywhere else to go,” said Magar.

As the rain became more intense, the river started to swell. All his family members and those living in the settlement stayed awake throughout the night, not knowing what was happening outside since there was no light.

“We could only hear the sound of the river,” Magar said. “The more it rained, battering our tin roof, the faster our hearts beat.”

Incessant rains on Monday night inundated many squatter settlements along the river banks of the Kathmandu Valley. Places such as Kalimati, Kuleshwar, Narephant, UN Park, Balaju, Nepaltar, Mulpani and a few places in Bhaktapur also got water-logged.

According to the Kathmandu Valley Police Office, 33 people were rescued from different parts of the Valley by Tuesday afternoon. Two persons who were injured have been getting treatment at the Sinamangal-based KMC Hospital and the National Trauma Centre.

In Kathmandu, police rescued 13 men, nine women and two children. In Lalitpur, four people were rescued, including one man, one woman and two children. Similarly in Bhaktapur, five people were rescued from gushing waters, including two men, one woman, and two children. A few vehicles were swept away.

“So far, there has not been any loss of human life in the Valley,” said Senior Superintendent Dinesh Raj Mainali, also the spokesman of the Valley Police Office. “The rain and the gushing drain water did cause massive inconvenience in people’s lives though.”

By Tuesday morning, the water level in Bagmati, Bishnumati, Ichhumati, Dhobi Khola, Manohara and Samakhushi rivers had risen alarmingly, inundating the squatter settlements in Teku and Balkhu areas.

According to the Meteorological Forecasting Division, under the Department of Hydrology and Meteorology, Kathmandu recorded 64.1 mm rainfall on Tuesday.

Police are yet to ascertain the loss caused by flash floods in the Valley. More than 400 security personnel were deployed across the inundated areas with the police alerting squatters living on the banks of the Bagmati river.

“Last year, it was Kathmandu Metropolitan City that tried to evacuate us without giving us alternatives,” said Magar, who is the chairperson of the Utpidit Sukumbasi Sangh (association of oppressed squatters). “We lived in fear of the City police for a month because Mayor Balendra Shah announced the evacuation without giving us any alternatives.”

In 2012, the Baburam Bhattarai government pulled down a total of 251 huts of landless squatters on the Bagmati banks in Thapathali, mobilising more than 2,000 security personnel. Only 46 families received Rs25,000 to relocate themselves. Eleven families were resettled on the banks of the Manohara river but they face a high risk of floods there too.

The government also built houses for squatters far from the city area. Located in Ichangu Narayan, each house is priced between Rs1.2–1.3 million. However, squatters objected to the high price and the location.

“Life is very uncertain on the bank of the river, but people think that we are living here by choice,” Magar said. “No, it’s our compulsion.”

The squatters in the area lived in fear last year too.

In late November last year, after the High Powered Committee for Integrated Development of Bagmati Civilisation issued notice for a third time on November 11 ordering the squatters to move out by November 20, KMC had sent its City police to evacuate the settlement in Thapathali. But after a strong resistance by squatters, the KMC backtracked on its order.

According to the Nepal Landless Democratic Union Party, which advocates the cause of squatters, more than 29,000 landless people in Kathmandu Valley live in 73 settlements. Of them, 1,082 families were registered as squatters in 2012. The party’s report shows more than 8,000 families are living on the Bagmati riverbanks alone.

Nearly 80 percent of all squatters in the Valley live on the riverbanks in Kathmandu, Bhaktapur and Lalitpur, according to the party.