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Putting Water
in
Taps
Ajaya
Dixit
Bir Dhara provided private
connections
to the Rana palaces and to the homes
of the
ruling elite. The system also
supplied water
to Phohora Durbar, a cinema hall
and a stage for performing
cultural programmes constructed
in 1885. The palace was sold,
demolished and levelled
in 1960. |
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ON April 21st 2008, Merina Sharma of The Himalayan
Times reported “Denizens of Kathmandu Valley have
been compelled to make do with 91 million litres of
water daily, even as they need 220 million litres of
per day”. A housewife living within the capital’s
ring road would complain, “In the past, we used to
get piped water once a day, now we get it once a
week”. Officials attribute the poor level of service
to the gap between supply and demand. They argue
that ‘drying up of sources due to soaring
temperature’, ‘inadequate rainfall’ and ‘increase in
population’ are the main reasons for the poor level
of service. Indeed the population in and around
Kathmandu’s ring road and other road arteries has
significantly increased due to pull and push
factors. The high rate of increase in population in
the last decade has in fact stretched the
capitals’ infrastructure and institutions.
The above story is not new. Kathmandu’s poor service
level of drinking water supply has continued to
remain a subject of public discussions for many
decades. Though substantial investments have been
made to improve the level of service, the outcomes
are not encouraging. To seek answers, we need to
look at the physical characteristic of Kathmandu
Valley and the century-old institutional dysfunction
in the city’s drinking water sector. The Bagmati
River that drains the valley is a monsoon-fed river
unlike the snow-fed Trisuli and the Indrawati/ Sun
Kosi rivers to its west and east respectively. Due
to their physical formation, these snow-fed rivers
could be tapped to meet the needs of the burgeoning
city flow at least 400 to 700 meters below the
valley floor.
Bir Dhara Works
Pipe water technology, in the form of the Bir Dhara
Works, was first brought to Kathmandu in 1891 CE.
The killing of Ranodweep Singh in the 1880s by his
own cousins heralded the demise of the Jungs and
rise of the Sumsheres. Prime Minister Bir Sumshere
Rana summoned a British engineer to build a drinking
water system in Kathmandu as an act of expiation of
his sins—he was accused of killing his own kin. The
man who heralded the era of modern technology into a
medieval kingdom was Engineer Mathew Lochard
Sinclair. Kathmandu had embarked on a path to
expertise-led globalisation and modern technology
had arrived as an element of luxury unlike its place
of origin where it was a means to increase
production. The Rana potentates were their social
carriers and this hallmark left by the original
social carrier continues to stamp the planning and
implementation of modern technologies including
management of water supply in the capital.
Bir Dhara provided private connections to the Rana
palaces and to the homes of the ruling elite. The
system also supplied water to Phohora Durbar, a
cinema hall and a stage for performing cultural
programmes constructed in 1885. A series of
fountains were installed in the garden and inside
the building was a crystal fountain scented with
rose water; the many fountains provided the building
with its name, Phohora Durbar (the Fountain Palace).
The palace was sold, demolished and levelled in
1960. Till the mid-twentieth century, cholera,
typhoid and smallpox were widespread and resulted in
a high mortality rate in Kathmandu. The sources of
water used by majority of the valley people were
stone water spouts (dhunge dhara), springs, ponds (pokhari),
water holes (kuwa), rivers and dug wells (inar).The
health of the people was made worse by poor sanitary
conditions, the lack of education, poor nutrition
and by the absence of preventive health services.
Stand-posts provided in selected places, the
designers claimed would provide clean water to the
public and improve health conditions. The
traditional sources of water are still used.
To provide drinking water to increasing population
of Kathmandu, new water supply systems were laid. In
1928 the Tri Bhim Dhara system was built. To
administer drinking water services Pani Goswara (the
first water works office) was established in 1929. A
few years later a hydro electric power plant was
built at Sundarijal. The water from the tailrace of
the plant was tapped to supply the residents of
Kathmandu. Many foreign aid agencies supported
expansion of the system after the 1950s. In the
early 1970s, the World Bank became the main actor in
managing Kathmandu’s water supply and in almost two
decades, about Rs 756 million was pumped in. The
loan aimed to improve the drinking water and
wastewater services in the city and a few towns
outside of Kathmandu. This was followed by three
additional loan packages. In 1974 the government
established the Water Supply and Sanitation Board (WSSB).
The Nepal Water Supply Corporation (NWSC) emerged as
its new form in 1989. The Melamchi Project was
selected as a viable option for Kathmandu’s
increasing needs in the mid-1980s. In those heydays
of the post-referendum Panchayat polity, the cliché
was that Melamchi’s clear waters would flush the
filth of the Bagmati. Later leaders promised to wash
Kathmandu’s streets with that same water.
Recognising that the level of drinking water supply
services had not improved despite the investments,
in 1987 the government constituted a threemember
commission to review the urban water sector funded
by the World Bank. The commission was headed by
member of the then Rastriya Panchayat, Birendra
Keshari Pokharel. The ‘Pokharel Commission Report’
showed poor quality of services, fiscal
incontinence, and institutional haemorrhage in the
NWSC. The commission recommended that
decision-making be decentralised to municipalities,
that water leakages be reduced and that the
financial management of NWSC be improved. It
recommended that a Public Utility Commission be
formed to hedge tariffs. Both the World Bank and the
government neglected these recommendations. The
results were continued decline in the quality of
service. The loan money was also used to lay sewer
lines to collect and treat sewage, but since the
treatment facilities never functioned as designed,
wastewater is dumped untreated in the Bagmati and
its tributaries, turning them into open sewers.
Tumultuous Nineties
In the late 1980s, while global and Nepali politics
underwent a welcome fundamental shift, the flip side
was the emergence of the ideology of corporate
globalisation (IFI loan conditions, structural
adjustment programmes, etc). Western governments and
aid institutions imposed it as a panacea for nascent
democracies, including Nepal, instead of helping
nurture a plurality of approaches to build
competitive markets that would be regulated by
socially rooted social and political institutions.
The bureaucracy, adept at co-opting developmental
languages, remained faithful to its aid masters and
became a champion of free market.
In 1990 the government formulated a fifteen-year
plan to improve the quality of service in the city’s
water supply and wastewater systems. While its goals
were lofty it remained silent on overcoming the
haemorrhaging institutional dysfunction. Yet donors
and the government continued to pump millions of
rupees into the corporation. In mid 1990, the
Corporation was twinned with a British private water
company, South Stafordshire, supplying drinking
water and wastewater services in an English city to
help build its management capacity. This arrangement
did not improve services either. The programme’s
review in 1995 showed that very little had improved
since 1987. The review too, recommended fiscal and
administrative devolution, but were again ignored.
Without exploring other institutional modes, in 1998
the government constituted the High Level Private
Sector Participation Committee to pave ways for a
private operator to manage Kathmandu’s water supply.
By the mid 1990s the World Bank was dithering and a
few years later would withdraw from the urban
drinking water sector. In a 2002 interview with
local weekly Nepali Times, the Bank’s representative
in Kathmandu, Ken Ohashi, admitted that the Bank’s
investment had been flushed down the Bagmati. Asked,
“What about Melamchi? Why are you not involved?”,
Ohashi replied: “This is not a popular position in
Kathmandu, where many people view Melamchi as the
solutions to all their water problems. We believe
that important options have not been explored to
utilise the water resources available within the
Valley.” He also raised questions about Melamchi
crowding out priority projects and equity concerns
from a national perspective. Both questions have
remained unanswered. In a display of donor
competition, the Asian Development Bank jumped in to
fill the vacuum.
Metropolis And The Periphery
Kathmandu’s quest of institutionalising a mechanism
for managing drinking water supply is as old as the
process in the United Kingdom. When engineer
Sinclair was implementing Bir Dhara, private
companies were already supplying drinking water to
cities in Britain, the United States and Germany.
With the introduction of the flush toilet on a large
scale, the consumption of water in cities increased.
The use of flush toilets was a major achievement in
improving personal hygiene, but a step backward in
public sanitation as untreated human waste was
discharged into rivers, thus lowering water quality.
Industrialisation and migration to cities increased
the density of people in cities and thereby created
serious public health problems. To address public
health concerns, pipes were used to supply water.
Many private water companies began providing
drinking water, but, they were interested more in
making a profit.
Gradually drinking water was linked to basic human
necessity, and government departments were made
responsible for delivering wholesome water to the
people. They were also to maintain the systems
build, ensure the quantity and quality of water
supply, set tariffs, and protect land and water
bodies from pollution by wastewater. The
responsibilities were later transferred to local
governments, which managed
drinking water and wastewater services till 1974.
That year, with Parliamentary approval, and
concurrence from the opposition parties, the
government transferred the responsibility for the
provision of water and wastewater services to ten
regional water authorities.
With the oil crisis of the 1970s, Britain faced
economic hardships and the government was unable to
invest sufficiently in improving the quality of
water and wastewater services. For political
reasons, the government could not raise the water
tariff to finance the necessary improvements either.
As investment declined, the performance of the
regional authorities declined too. In 1989, the
British government decided that the responsibility
for providing drinking water and wastewater services
would be entrusted to the private sector, as it
could not mobilise the resources it needed to meet
the standards for the quality of water and
wastewater set by the European Union (EU).
The private companies were thus given the
responsibility of providing water and wastewater
services. Setting standards was the responsibility
of the central government and was governed by the
standards set by the EU. The responsibility for
applying the standards for the drinking water sector
rested with the Drinking Water Inspectorate.
Monitoring was entrusted to the Director General of
the Office of Water Services (OFWAT), who was given
the powers to set the price of water that private
operators charge and to oblige them to carry out
their responsibilities efficiently.
Meanwhile in Kathmandu, institutional dysfunction of
NWCF persisted. A World Bank report in 1999 observed
that the government maintained “extensive and tight
controls” over NWSC, including appointment of senior
staff, inadequate tariff increases and weak
management and operational capabilities. This
outcome was not surprising. Though labelled
autonomous, the Corporation was de-facto a
governmental outfit. Its 1989 Act stipulated that
the corporation should “comply with [government]
directives”. Genetically, it was designed to suit
political manipulation, rentseeking and became a
medium for dispensing patronage.
Kathmandu invites a high level of inmigration due to
the various facilities that are inherently available
therein. This pull factor is compounded by the
influx of the more well-to-do villagers from the
districts who are unable to live there due to the
ongoing violence. In the fast paced changing
political environment of the post 2006, the process
of improving Kathmandu’s water supply tended to
become a pingpong game among the government, the
donors and civil society actors. The once rebel
Maoists signed a peace accord and joined the
transitional government led by Girija Prasad Koirala.
After she became minister for Works and Transport,
Maoist leader Hisila Yami took a stand against
awarding the task of managing Kathmandu’s water as
per the new act to British water company Severn
Trent.
In the mean time, the government created three
organisations: Kathmandu Valley Drinking Water
Board, Tariff Setting Commission and Kathmandu
Upatyaka Drinking Water Limited (KUKL). The
elections to the Constituent Assembly were held on
April 10th 2008. Few days after the election, as per
the recommendations of the Asian Development Bank,
KUKL appointed a Managing Director and two deputies
for a period of a year and a half. According to
media reports these expatriate professionals had
already begun work.
Implanting A Paradigm
Modern pipe systems for supplying drinking water in
Britain and Kathmandu began for different reasons.
Private companies in Britain started to provide
drinking water for profit. The Rana rulers of Nepal,
imitating Western lifestyles, introduced water
supply technology in order to bring water to their
palaces but the profit-making notion was absent. The
political systems in the two countries were also
different. Britain had a democratically elected
parliamentary system of government, but Nepal was
ruled by the Rana oligarchy.
When the British government privatised drinking
water and wastewater services in England and Wales
in 1989, the practice of having private companies
supply water was not new. Researchers suggest that
by the late twentieth century, 25 percent of
Britain’s water supply was managed by companies that
are directly descended from the companies that began
operating at the time of the first Industrial
Revolution in the 1770s.
The British initiative was influenced by external
factors: one was the oil crisis of 1970s and another
was its having to meet the EU’s demand for higher
drinking water and wastewater quality standards.
Unable to raise funds to improve its infrastructure
so that it could comply with the EU’s requirements,
the British government sold the country’s water and
wastewater services to the private sector. The idea
of water as a private good thus re-entered the
discourse — the market would ascertain its scarcity
value. The response was also guided by the political
imperative of the Conservative government of
Margaret Thatcher, which aimed to minimise the role
of trade unions in the delivery of services. Like
the UK, external factors influenced the water supply
improvement initiatives in Kathmandu (contact
between Nepal and modernising Europe in the late
nineteenth century; the World Bank loan in 1970s;
conditionality for getting the private operator in
the late 1990s). These factors continue to exercise
influence. The move to involve the private company
(or professionals) in the drinking water services is
also determined by conditions set by lending
agencies than by a felt need within the society.
Plural Democratic Terrain
In the changing but cacophonous context of
Kathmandu’s drinking water sector different social
groups have responded to the poor level of services
differently. These responses can be conceived to be
made by four social solidarities: the users, the
state, the market and civil society institutions.
Individuals and communities that fall outside of the
field of vision of development continue to rely on
wells and stone water spouts. Despite their
dilapidated condition, many stone water spouts
continue to meet the needs of these
individuals and communities. The users may wish for
modern amenities but they lack the economic
wherewithal to access a market solution and the
political clout to be heard in policy circles.
Government and government-led authorities and
corporations, the second group of actors have taken
upon themselves the responsibility of supplying
water through modern piped systems. In partnership
with international development agencies, they have
opted for engineering solutions such as the
trans-basin water transfer project (Melamchi) as one
among several options. Melamchi and other such
projects enhance the government’s sense of control
because only the management by their expertise-based
bureaucracy can design, implement and operate such
larger and complex schemes. The solution proffered
by the state is projects that require trans-basin
water transfer, which are capital intensive,
large-scale, and requires long lead time as well as
expertise dependent management. It is based on the
notion of scarcity that needs to be managed.
Since this option will not materialise for at least
a decade or more, a bevy of operators have emerged
in the meanwhile as the third group of actors. They
supply drinking water to Kathmandu denizens through
a variety of means, which include tankers that draw
water from spring sources in the valley outskirts,
shallow groundwater extracting ‘rower pumps’ as well
as bottled water, which has appeared in the last
decade or so as the poor municipal supply has
created incentives for the this market to flourish.
The response favoured by the market, either bottled
water or tanker supply, believes that resource can
be harnessed if people are allowed to pay the proper
price.
The fourth group to respond has been activist NGOs,
consumer forums of academics and journalists who
question the solutions proposed by both government
agencies and the private sector. They argue that
there are alternative means of supply such as
rainwater harvesting, reviving traditional ponds and
conserving the stone water spout which, in their
view, would be both cheaper and more equitable. The
activists contest the approach of the sate and the
market: they argue that the resource base is
depleting
through pollution, over-extraction of groundwater
and degradation of surface water, hence there is a
need to look into alternatives. In other words, the
market has unfairly exploited the situation of
mismanagement by the state.
In addition to building a scheme ensuring a reliable
supply requires building institutions that manage
water. Recent concepts on the governance of natural
resources such as water suggests that a mix of
institutional styles—government, market and
community initiatives—is necessary for the policy
terrain to remain dynamic and stable. Plural
institutions contribute to improved level of
services also helping achieve equity.
Does the current mechanism designed to improve
Kathmandu’s drinking water services
incorporate notion of plurality and institutional
check and balances? Will this mechanism deliver
wholesome water in the taps? What will be the story
of drinking water in Kathmandu next year? Answers to
these questions need to be teased out from the
events on-folding in Kathmandu’s turbulent drinking
water terrain
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