Off the Record 011: A hard rain's a-gonna fall
Issue 011 • 18 June 2021
It’s June 18, 2021, and you’re reading Off the Record, the weekly newsletter from The Record. We are an independent, ad-free, digital news publication out of Kathmandu, Nepal.
I’m Pranaya Rana, editor of The Record, and in this newsletter, we’ll stop, take a deep breath, and dive deep into one singular issue that defined the past week.
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There’s no shortage of woe in Nepal.
This year began with massive wildfires across the country. For months, thousands of wildfires big and small raged across the country, creating a pall of smoke that blighted vision and burned the lungs.
Then, just as the wildfires subsided, the second wave of the pandemic struck, filling hospitals and killing thousands. Daily infection rates soared for months before finally dropping in mid-May.
As Covid cases began to subside and health care providers breathed a sigh of relief, the rains came. As always, the monsoon arrived with a vengeance, pouring rain down on parched earth that had barely recovered from the wildfires. As residents of the Kathmandu Valley welcomed the rains for providing relief from the oppressive heat, those outside were scrambling for their lives, running from floodwaters that engulfed their homes and possessions.
Loss and death come without warning in Nepal. Flooding in various districts across the country is believed to have taken dozens of lives, at least 25 according to Nepali Times.
When confronted with such successive disasters, it is easy to fall back into fatalism — that perhaps all this death and destruction was preordained, that we might somehow ‘deserve’ this divine punishment. But there is little of divine provenance in these wildfires, floods, and Covid-19. All of these disasters could’ve been prepared for, precautions taken to minimize their consequences, and when they arrived, capable, well-thought-out, and scientifically informed measures instituted to reduce the harm. As Kunda Dixit of Nepali Times is fond of saying, there is nothing natural about these natural disasters.
Melamchi Bazaar on Wednesday. Photo: RSS
This week, we’ll take a closer look at the floods and landslides, and see how they relate to the hollowing out of Nepal’s hills and rivers, as discussed in last week’s newsletter.
Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening.
The deep dive: A hard rain’s a-gonna fall
The monsoon is the lifeblood of South Asia. Farmers across the region await the arrival of the rains to feed their summer crops. The rains mark the beginning of rice plantation, with ropain, the annual rice-planting festival taking place on Asar 15, usually in mid-June. Generally, the monsoon arrives in Nepal on June 10 and withdraws about 100 days later in September. A delayed monsoon can have devastating consequences for countries like Nepal, which still rely heavily on agriculture for their economy. This year’s monsoon was delayed by just a day or two, as the rains arrived on Friday, June 11. Meteorologists do not expect this delay to have any significant effect.
The monsoon gives life to the region, resulting in bountiful harvests, well-fed livestock, and well-nourished individuals. The eminent Sanskritist Gautam Vajracharya calls the monsoon a “beautiful dream”, one that Indian and Nepali artists attempted to represent in their works. Vajracharya relates the monsoon not just to prosperity but also to procreation. Without the rains, there are droughts, which in turn lead to famines. And when there are famines, there is a marked effect on fertility. Interestingly, fertility rates bounce back almost immediately when famines are lifted, as women tend to weather starvation better than men. Thus, indigenous South Asian art tends to show men and women with fat, round bellies, a sign of prosperity and fertility, says Vajracharya.
But as the monsoon giveth, so it taketh away.
In the hills of Nepal, every year, the monsoon rains trigger landslides that kill hundreds. According to one report, from 1972 to 2016, over 5,100 people died in landslides, 90 percent of which occurred during the monsoon. Often, these landslides result in temporary dams on rivers and streams that are in turn being fed by the monsoon rains. Already swollen rivers encounter these dams where water builds up and eventually breaks through, creating flash floods that sweep away fields, livestock, homes, people.
Images emerged on Tuesday and Wednesday of widespread devastation in nearby Melamchi, just about 40 kilometers from Kathmandu. Melamchi Bazaar, which lies at the confluence of the Melamchi and Indrawati rivers, was inundated when both rivers flooded. Hundreds of households in Melamchi and upstream Helambu had to be evacuated. The floods, however, weren’t just due to excessive rainfall. According to the Department of Hydrology and Meteorology, the district of Sindhupalchok, where Melamchi lies, received the most rain on Saturday, 12 June. Rather, it is believed that temporary blockages upstream on both the Melamchi and Indrawati rivers, possibly due to landslides, had created a dam that burst.
Rainfall in Sindhupalchok over the week. Photo: Department of Hydrology and Meteorology
All 11 districts of Gandaki Province have experienced floods and landslides. Even mountainous districts like Manang have reported flash floods and have had to evacuate people.
On Friday, the Department of Hydrology issued flash flood warnings for numerous districts, including the Koshi, Kankai, Kamala, Bagmati, Rapti, and Babai river basins. Nine districts in Province 1, four in Province 2, nine in Bagmati Province, nine in Gandaki Province, seven in Lumbini Province, six in Karnali Province, and eight in Sudurpaschim Province are expected to witness excessive flow in the rivers that could result in flash floods, warned the department in its daily flood bulletin. Going into Saturday, districts in Province 2, Bagmati, Lumbini, and Sudurpaschim are at high risk of flooding. In the coming weeks, the floods are expected to move downstream to the plains.
There is also the specter of climate change, which is leading to changes in rainfall patterns. In 2020, NASA had released a report titled ‘Climate change could trigger more landslides in high mountain Asia’ which stated that the border region between Nepal and China could see a 30 to 70 percent increase in landslide activity in the near future. Rainfall during the monsoon is lasting longer and getting more excessive each year. Like last year, this year too, the rains came down fast and heavy, as opposed to the gradual build-up that was once a defining characteristic of the monsoon. In dry areas or soil scorched by the wildfires earlier this year, heavy rainfall leads to a lot more surface runoff as the soil is unable to quickly absorb the moisture.
Each monsoon, rivers flood, homes are evacuated, lives are lost. And yet, nothing changes. Rescue teams are deployed and individuals come together to raise funds for flood relief. According to watershed expert Madhukar Upadhya, who writes extensively on hydrology and watershed management, Nepali authorities have taken the wrong approach to mitigate floods and landslides. They still operate under the assumption that afforestation, or planting trees, will prevent landslides and thus, will also prevent floods. This is also what we were taught in school, that the roots of trees hold on to the soil and prevent collapse or washing away.
Upadhya disagrees.
“Heavy monsoon downpour causes mass failure of inherently unstable slopes on a large scale and at depths far below the root zone of trees (normally three metres). Forest cover, while desirable for many good reasons, plays little or no role in stopping such mass wasting,” he told The Third Pole in 2020.
Upadhya believes that landslides and floods are an inherent part of Himalayan geography. These are natural processes that will continue to occur, whether humans are around or not, and they have their own advantages — from depositing fertile alluvial soil to create the Gangetic plains to diversifying land and facilitating different natural processes. It is a matter of understanding which slopes are unstable and which rivers are prone to flooding and then avoiding those areas for human habitation.
Of course, this is not always possible. Nepal is either hilly, mountainous country that is prone to landslides or it is flatland that is prone to flooding. Communities inhabit both these extremes and will continue to do so. Settlements built on fragile slopes or on the banks of rivers can be relocated but to where? There are few spaces in Nepal that are not at risk of some natural disaster. Furthermore, not everyone has the luxury of being able to choose where they live. The landless squatters living on the banks of the Bagmati in the Kathmandu Valley did not choose the riverside for their homes but they had little choice in the matter.
Engineering can be employed to prop up slopes and create embankments but these are often temporary measures as nature is a slow but unrelenting force. Relief, compensation, and relocation all take place after the fact. So do early warning systems — no matter how early they are, they can only issue warnings once the disaster is already progressing.
There are, however, measures that Nepal can take to minimize the risks or to prevent an escalation of an already existing danger. Landslides will occur but perhaps they will occur with less frequency if roads were not carved willy-nilly out of fragile hills. Thousands of dirt and gravel roads have been constructed across the mid-hills since the local elections of 2017. These roads are often constructed by companies belonging to local-level politicians and without any Environmental Impact Assessments. Locals too are often happy to have a road that connects them to markets and services. A 2018 study concluded that “rainfall-triggered landslides are more than twice as likely to occur within 100 m of a road”.
But it is not just roads that are exacerbating disasters; the excessive mining of the river beds and river banks for sand and pebbles is equally to blame. When river beds are gouged of their sand and rocks, there is little to slow the flow of water. When river banks are denuded, there is little to keep the waters inside the rivers. Melamchi itself has been plundered for over two decades for its resources.
This is why the government’s decision to resume the export of construction material that will be mined from the rivers and hills is so myopic. In the pursuit of short-term profits for a select few, the federal government has decided to gamble with the lives of its citizens. While there are some who would argue that Nepal must export whatever it can in order to reduce the trade deficit, it is infinitely moronic to suggest that the country must plunder its resources, place its citizens in danger and incur annual losses in the billions just so the trade deficit might be reduced a little.
Given the fact of our geography, Nepalis must learn to live alongside nature, something that our ancestors knew very well. Disasters are unavoidable but listening to science while also drawing on the indigenous knowledge of the past can help minimize the death and destruction. People, too, must learn to place prudence over profit. A river-view resort on the banks of the Indrawati might bring in tourists but the same river could also wash away the entire resort on a whim.
Last year, David Seddon and Ranjan Prakash Sharma had written this about why landslides and floods continue to take hundreds of lives every year:
Despite all the policies, program and projects, floods and landslides continue to damage and destroy property and livelihoods, and to ruin the lives of tens of thousands every year. The reasons include political inertia and corruption, inadequate institutional development, lack of appropriate technical and human resources for effective preparation and action at the different levels, from national through provincial and district down to local levels.
The monsoon has only just arrived. The rains will peak in about a month’s time, in mid-July to mid-August. We have only breached the surface of the disasters that are yet to come. The worst is still ahead of us.
On The Record this week:
Shuvam Rizal on the short-term profits and long-term losses of mining and exporting construction material
Ishita Shahi provides an update on Nepal’s vaccinations
Kalpana Jha on how writing can be a process of discovery and analysis
Happenings this week:
Saturday - Nepali Congress’ Krishna Chandra Nepali Pokhrel replaced CPN-UML’s Prithvi Subba Gurung as chief minister of Gandaki Province after the latter lost a vote of confidence in the provincial parliament. Gurung was an Oli stalwart and his loss does not portend well for Oli and the UML in the province.
Sunday - The three districts of the Kathmandu Valley extended the lockdown by another week but with a few concessions for grocery stores, bookshops, agriculture, and delivery services. The Valley has been under lockdown for nearly two months now.
Monday - The National Examination Board announced that this school year’s Secondary Education Examinations too would be evaluated based on internal marks but that any teacher awarding more than 80 percent to a student would have to furnish a clarification. Last year, many teachers had been discovered to have awarded wildly high internal marks to their students.
Tuesday - News emerged that the Oli Cabinet had decided to purchase 4 million doses of the Verocell vaccine from China after signing a non-disclosure agreement. However, the Health Ministry issued a statement on Friday saying no such decision had been made yet.
Wednesday - Throughout Tuesday and Wednesday, floodwaters from the Melamchi and Indrawati rivers inundated Melamchi Bazaar, killing at least seven and displacing hundreds of households.
Thursday - Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli and President Bidya Bhandari both defended their decision to dissolve Parliament in writing to the constitutional bench of the Supreme Court. While the president claimed that her actions cannot be subjected to a judicial review, the prime minister said that the court cannot interfere in matters concerning the executive and the legislative. Over two dozen petitions have been filed against the House dissolution. A final hearing will begin on June 23.
Friday - Melamchi Municipality announced that it had created a relief fund of Rs 5 million for those affected by the floods, and that it would also be accepting financial assistance.
Read of the week
‘Riding into the future: A short history of women and cycling in Nepal’ — Part 2 of Prashanta Khanal’s series on cycling in Nepal
Announcements
If you’d like to donate to individuals and organizations who are helping provide health care services, medical supplies, and daily essentials to those who need them, here’s a short list of recommendations:
Feed the Hungry Nepal provides daily meals to those who cannot afford it
America Nepal Medical Foundation is securing oxygen supplies and providing infrastructure like oxygen concentrators
Juju Kaji Maharjan provides daily meals and supplies to those who need them in Kathmandu
Sano Paila provides food and relief material in Birgunj
Oxygen Bank Support is starting an oxygen bank, creating temporary isolation centers, and supporting hospitals with medical supplies
Peace4Dalits Foundation supports Madhesi Dalits with food and supplies
That’s all for this week. I shall see you Friday on the next edition of Off the Record.
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