Off the Record 104: Drought amidst the monsoon
Issue 104 • 04 August 2023
It’s August 4, 2023, and you’re reading Off the Record.
I’m Pranaya Rana and in this newsletter, we’ll stop, take a deep breath, and dive into one singular issue that defined the past week.
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Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening from hot and humid Kathmandu. It has been a slow week for the news but here in Nepal, even slow weeks are filled with events of note that should perhaps be relayed to you, constant reader. So here we go.
Let’s start with an update on the 100-kilo gold smuggling case that seized headlines two weeks ago. [In case you’ve been living under a rock and missed what that was all about, you can read this newsletter.] Currently, the investigation into the smuggling is being led by the Department of Revenue Investigation, leading many to question why the case hasn’t been handed over to the police yet. On Thursday, Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal pledged that the investigation would now be led by the Nepal Police’s Central Investigation Bureau since there was reason to believe that this is not just about gold smuggling but also involved organized, international crime that could even be linked to terrorist networks. So far, 18 people, including one Belgian, one Chinese, and one Indian, have been arrested in relation to the smuggling of 100 kilos of gold. The mastermind behind the smuggling, however, has yet to be identified. Dahal further pledged that everyone, including his own party members, would be prosecuted if they were found to be involved.
And speaking of his party members, the police have been looking into previous cases of smuggling and have found one instance of the smuggling of 9 kilos of gold inside cases of e-cigarettes that allegedly involves Maoist vice-chair and former House Speaker Krishna Bahadur Mahar and his son. Mahara, however, is not being investigated by the police, which has left many wondering if the Pushpa Kamal Dahal administration is interested in upholding the rule of law or prosecuting political opponents. Mahara, who was forced to resign as House Speaker in 2019 after a rape accusation, has meanwhile proclaimed his innocence on social media.
The gold smugglers have also been linked to Maoist politicians like Barsa Man Pun and Nanda Kishor Pun, leading many within the Maoist party itself to call for investigations into its senior politicians. The opposition party, the UML, has been obstructing the House and demanding that an independent panel be constituted to look into the gold smuggling. That sounds like a good idea. If Dahal and his Home Minister Narayan Kaji Shrestha are serious about prosecuting everyone involved, including members of their own party, then an independent panel might help. But, there’s a danger here too. In previous instances where such a committee was formed, their jurisdiction clashed with that of the police, and ultimately, none of their findings held water in court. Police officials have claimed that such committees don’t work if they’re not staffed with people who have some experience in conducting investigations. Bureaucrats plucked from the ministries cannot do the job of the police, they say.
The Maoists are currently holding their central committee meeting in Kathmandu and the senior leadership is getting lambasted by party members. Many blame Dahal for the Maoists’ poor showing in the last election and have criticized his tendency to appoint his family members to top positions. Dahal has been taking his daughter Ganga Dahal to high-profile meetings with international leaders, much to the chagrin of other party members and even those in the Foreign Ministry. Some have even called for investigations into the assets and properties of the top leadership, daring Dahal to put his money where his mouth is, given his newfound zero-tolerance position on corruption. I don’t expect much to come of this meeting. It is more formality than anything. Dahal will continue to exercise near-absolute power over the Maoist party, as he’s done for the past twenty or so years now.
But let’s move on from such dreary matters to more outlandish stunts. On Wednesday, Rabi Lamichhane, chair of the Rastriya Swatantra Party, announced a number of ‘special programs’ for his constituency, Chitwan-2. These programs include a special ‘blue bus’ for female commuters in Chitwan-2 that will provide free transport and a mobile clinic that will provide free checkups to senior citizens and refer them to hospitals in case they need advanced treatment. These seem like sensible, low-investment ideas that will benefit his constituents. But then, Lamichhane of course had to announce a populist measure to go along with his realistic ideas. The RSP will be providing 164 free air tickets to any Nepalis working in foreign lands to return home to Nepal where they will also be provided with jobs across a variety of sectors that pay anywhere from Rs 15,000 to Rs 150,000 monthly. Lamichanne claimed that ads announcing the special program had been placed in local newspapers in the Middle East, Malaysia, and South Korea in order to attract foreign workers to return to Nepal.
This might not seem like a bad idea in itself but such piecemeal approaches are not going to stem the massive foreign employment tide. Thousands of Nepalis leave the country every month in search of employment abroad and unless a concerted effort is made to increase job opportunities in Nepal itself, such populist programs are not going to help. Furthermore, it is not just about employment but also basic salaries that are on par with rising inflation and cost of living; it is also about dignity of labor and proper working conditions; it is about reducing the cost of doing business and eliminating corruption. All of these need to be addressed too.
There’s not much else of note to report. So forgive me if I cut this newsletter short and move right ahead to the deep dive.
The deep dive: Drought amidst the monsoon
Image: Kanchan Jha
Nepal is currently in the middle of the monsoon, that time of the year usually characterized by heavy rains. But, at the same time, parts of Nepal, especially the Madhes, are ironically also in the middle of a drought. Almost all of the 22 districts that make up the Madhes are currently reporting widespread drought-like conditions, and this is at a time when the region plants rice every year, a water-intensive crop that requires the monsoon rains to flourish. Things have gotten so bad that rural municipalities are seeking help from the provinces and the federal level not just to irrigate their crops but even for daily consumption.
Unlike in the hilly areas, many households in the Madhes-Tarai still depend on shallow hand pumps and wells for water. These pumps and wells did not need to bore too deep into the ground. Hand pumps, especially, went in just 5-10 meters deep and brought up water easily. While these hand pumps provided water for household usage, deeper bore wells were used to irrigate farms and fields. But, as was bound to happen, the groundwater began to dry up and you had to go in deeper and deeper in order to find water. As CK Lal relates in his recent column about the drought in the Madhes, bore wells went from 30 meters deep in the early 1980s to 130 meters in recent years.
Things have gone from bad to worse this year. Much of the Madhes is reeling under a lack of water. In Birgunj, the authorities have had to distribute water to locals via water tankers brought in from outside the city. Locals are perplexed that their hand pumps have run out of water in the middle of the monsoon; such scarcity was usually only a characteristic of the lean winter times. The same thing is happening in Parsa and many other districts. Farmers don’t have enough water to irrigate their crops while households are struggling to meet their daily needs. The crisis is mounting and if solutions are not found soon, things could escalate to a point where people are dying due to a lack of water.
So why is this happening? There are a couple of reasons and they’re not all related to climate change. For one, there’s the wholesale extraction of resources from the Chure Hills that are disrupting water flows and groundwater recharge. When entire hills are denuded and destroyed in order to collect building materials like rocks, pebbles, soil, and sand, water is not able to seep into the ground and recharge groundwater aquifers. So on the one hand, the water runs off into the streams and rivers and causes floods when there is a lot of rainfall but on the other, when rainfall is scarce, like during this monsoon, there is not enough groundwater to go around.
Then, there is also the proliferation of deep bore wells in well-to-do households. Many municipalities in the Madhes still lack proper municipal water connections and even when homes have taps, the water supply is not regular or clean. This has forced many households to invest in deep bore wells that provide water all year round. The practice is the same in Kathmandu and many other cities around Nepal. Erratic, unreliable water supply has meant that most households in Kathmandu must dig deep wells where water is pulled up by electric pumps. But this also means that groundwater depletes faster than it can recharge, leading to a sinking water table. So every few years, the well dries up and you have to dig deeper in order to find more water. This problem is widespread, from Kathmandu to the Tarai.
Compounding the groundwater problem is that land is swiftly being covered in concrete. This is especially so in cities like Kathmandu and less so in the Madhes where a lot of land is still open and used primarily for farming. But the Madhes too is rapidly urbanizing and cities like Janakpur, Birgunj, and Bhairahawa are already feeling the effects. Water cannot seep into the ground where it is covered in concrete and hence, runs off into sewers and drains. And when it cannot find an outlet, it floods, turning roadways into temporary rivers. So if water is not seeping into the ground, it is not recharging the groundwater. When combined with widespread extraction, the groundwater continues to deplete while not having enough time to recharge itself.
Then, there’s the big bogey of our generation – climate change. Erratic weather patterns have led to significant problems already. This year, the monsoon was delayed and very weak. According to a report in The Kathmandu Post, this year, Nepal has only received 30 percent of its expected average monsoon rainfall and it is already mid-monsoon with just another month or so left until the rains subside. This below-average monsoon has led to drought-like conditions where there isn’t enough water to go around, not just for households but also for farms.
These conditions are not just limited to Nepal though. Bangladesh too is suffering from a below-average monsoon, impacting its rice plantation; a quarter of India’s farmland is facing drought-like conditions due to poor rains; Sri Lanka is looking at a food crisis due to droughts in its rice-producing area.
But not of it is due to climate change. This is the year of El Niño, a natural phenomenon in the eastern and central Pacific Ocean that leads to a warming of the ocean’s temperatures, which in turn affects the monsoon over South Asia. El Niño occurs every 2-7 years and has significant effects on temperature and rainfall. Much of what is happening in the Madhes-Tarai and South Asia is believed to be due to El Niño. However, scientists appear divided on whether climate change has affected El Niño. While the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has found no evidence that climate change has affected El Niño, a study by scientists from China and the United States found that increased greenhouse warming had led to El Niño originating farther to the west and increasing in intensity.
Whether El Niño is affected by climate change or not, the fact remains that there is a confluence of phenomena that has led to the current situation we are in. Perhaps the effects of El Niño could’ve been mitigated had our groundwater not been depleted. Climate change and its consequences are not just one monolithic event that changes everything. It’s a collection of events that, when combined with other associated hazards natural or otherwise, tend to create outsized consequences for us humans. So it’s not just a matter of screaming climate change until our voices go hoarse but rather, investing and implementing measures to mitigate other consequential events, like ensuring a regular municipal water supply so that people don’t have to rely on bore wells to draw water, or ensuring that there are enough spaces around for water to percolate into the ground, or ensuring that unscrupulous business interests aren’t carving out our hills and rivers in order to extract every last pebble and grain of sand. All of these are related and unless they’re all tackled, things are not going to get better.
Meanwhile, India, anticipating the effects of El Niño on its agriculture, has already banned the export of certain varieties of non-Basmati rice, triggering panic in many other countries like Nepal that depend on India for much of their rice imports. With our own production hampered and no imports coming in from India, Nepal could be looking at a rice shortage in the coming months. Nepali traders, always opportunists, have already hiked prices on rice.
So the coming months don’t look great for Nepal, not just the Madhes. While the Madhes continues to reel under droughts amidst the intense heat of summer, the rest of Nepal will probably have to cut down on its rice consumption. Most of Nepal eats non-Basmati rice, twice a day, and with Nepali farmers not producing rice due to droughts and India halting imports, our winter could be a woefully rice-less affair.
That’s all for this week. I will be back next Friday, in your emails, for the next edition of Off the Record.
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