The supply of drinking water, despite the city’s two fabled river systems, is no better; even the little water pushed into the byzantine maze of the municipal water supply system is lost to leakages. Such is the fate of Baghdad, Iraq’s beleaguered capital now left fending for itself after the withdrawal of all American troops late last year.
Sadly, all the problems discussed above are as applicable to Kathmandu. The load-shedding has been increased to 10 hours a day. And now the Valley residents are bracing for a particularly parched summer. Come March-April, they will have to make do with 23 liters of water per person per day—World Health Organization recommends at least 100 liters per person per day for the maintenance of decent hygiene and sanitary conditions.
Former Prime Minister KP Bhattarai, as much as he is remembered for his austere ways is as often brought up in conversations, fairly or not, for his broken promises, most notably to ‘inundate’ the Valley with the water of Melamchi within half a decade. This was in 1991. More than two decades down the line, the much-hyped Melamchi, projected to deliver up to 340 million liters of water a day (mld), is still in its construction phase, 2015/16 the earliest when it can be brought on line. Yet even if the project is completed within its (many times revised) deadline, it will fall far short of meeting demand as the population of the Valley continues to grow by up to half a million a year.
It surely doesn’t help that up to 20 percent of piped water is lost to leakages. Many of the pipelines in Kathmandu are up to a century old. Successive governments have failed to make timely repairs, owing to everything from resource crunch, lack of political will to absence of effective coordination between various government agencies.
For instance, the Road Department is riled up that the Kathmandu Upatyaka Khanepani Limited, the water utility supplying the Valley, fails to coordinate with it while digging up blacktopped roads (oftentimes newly laid) for repair works on water pipes underneath; it’s not their fault that the Road Department doesn’t bother to inform them about likely construction work on time, contends officials at the water utility.
This is an example of how government bodies often work at cross purposes and pass the buck while little gets done on the ground. The losers, in the process, are the common people who have had to learn to navigate the jagged, potholed roads and to live with the bitter fact that, in its failure to guarantee them even basic services, their beloved Kathmandu fares little better than the strife-riven Baghdad.
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