Off the Record 105: Kathmandu drowns every monsoon

Issue 105 • 11 August 2023

It’s August 11, 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 rainy, flood-prone Kathmandu. Halfway through its regular season, the monsoon has exploded in all its wrath, drenching the city and flooding its streets. That’s what we’ll take a closer look at in this week’s deep dive. But as usual, we have a few things to get out of the way first.

Let’s begin, as we tend to do these days, with controversy. Lharkyal Lama, a politician from the Maoist party, was appointed vice-chair of the Lumbini Development Trust by Cabinet decision on Sunday. As vice-chair, Lama will lead the Trust, which oversees all activities within the Lumbini World Heritage Site. But a quick reminder of who Lama is. Before joining the Maoist party, Lama was a Member of Parliament from the CPN-UML party, appointed under proportional representation, in 2011. He was even appointed state minister of finance during the Jhalanath Khanal administration. But Lama was forced to resign just over a week after his appointment when it emerged that he held an Indian passport and a Tibetan refugee card, and had traveled and possessed documents under three different aliases.

Then, he quit the UML party and joined the Maoists and was once again appointed to Parliament in 2016. This time around, Lama was taken into custody by police after the Commission for the Investigation of Abuse of Authority found 14 bullets inside his bank locker in the course of investigating him for corruption. Lama, however, was cleared of all charges by the Special Court, although I fail to understand how anyone could get away with possessing illegal ammunition and still not face a charge. And this is the man who has now been put in charge of the Lumbini Development Trust.

And speaking of corruption, the Supreme Court on Sunday made a landmark decision that is certain to have far-reaching consequences. Responding to a petition filed regarding the Lalita Niwas land grab, the Court decided that everyone involved in the process of turning over public land to private interests for pennies on the dollar should be investigated by the CIAA, and this includes prime ministers and ministers. Previously, the CIAA had refrained from probing politicians as its mandate was limited to public servants, and politicians themselves often resorted to the argument that ‘policy decisions’, i.e., decisions taken by the Cabinet, fell outside the CIAA’s ambit. But now, with the Supreme Court decision setting a precedent, politicians can no longer hide behind the cover of ‘policy decisions’. Now, former prime ministers Madhav Kumar Nepal and Baburam Bhattarai are both open to being investigated for their role in the Lalita Niwas land grab and so is every other prime minister who’s suspected to be involved in corruption. This is definitely a good thing.

In other news, there are two new measures in the works that threaten to significantly curtail freedom of speech and privacy rights in Nepal. First, the government is drafting a new bill aimed at monitoring social media content. While this might be necessary, given how much social media is used and abused, there is a very real danger that the proposed law will overreach and use vague language in order to provide leeway for the authorities to clamp down on free speech should they desire to. This was in part why a previous iteration of the bill, introduced by KP Sharma Oli when he was prime minister, called the Information Technology Bill, was eventually nixed after widespread criticism. The drafters of the bill will need to tread carefully and utilize specific, direct language so that the authorities cannot abuse the law, as is often done with the vaguely worded Electronic Transaction Act (ETA). In the absence of any specific law to deal with crimes conducted over the internet, including harassment, abuse, impersonation, etc, Clause 47.1 of the ETA is employed. This clause states:

If any person publishes or displays any material in the electronic media including computer, internet which are prohibited to publish or display by the prevailing law or which may be contrary to the public morality or decent behavior or any types of materials which may spread hate or jealousy against anyone or which may jeopardize the harmonious relations subsisting among the peoples of various castes, tribes and communities shall be liable to the punishment with the fine not exceeding One Hundred Thousand Rupees or with the imprisonment not exceeding five years or with both.

You see what I mean by vague language? Who decides what is “contrary to the public morality or decent behavior”? This kind of wording provides way too much leeway to the prosecuting authorities and to the judiciary to interpret the law as they desire. And it has been used in the past to jail journalists and prosecute citizens for their criticism of public figures on social media.

The second measure that threatens privacy is the Nepal Telecommunications Authority’s insistence on implementing something called ‘Teramox’, which is apparently a technology that will allow the Authority to listen in on private phone calls and even read private messages. Despite opposition from politicians across the spectrum, the Authority is reportedly insistent that the technology be implemented. Members of Parliament have criticized the technology on the grounds that it is ripe for abuse, especially when placed in the hands of an Authority that is led by an unelected, politically appointed chairperson. The technology could very easily be used to spy on rival politicians or even just invade the privacy of ordinary citizens under the guise of ‘investigation’. This article from Kantipur lays out the various issues with the technology but I find it hilarious that the reporter chose to quote Gokul Baskota for the article. Baskota, in case you’ve forgotten, was Minister for Communications and Information Technology until he was forced to resign in ignominy after a secretly recorded audio clip of him demanding a bribe of Rs 70 crore was leaked. So of course, Baskota would be against the recording of private communication.

More upsetting news comes to us from the UK where a British citizen was recently sentenced to 12 years in prison for soliciting sexual images of children as young as seven. The Nepal connection is that this man, named Matthew Smith, taught at The British School in Lalitpur from 2016-2022. The British School is an elite school primarily for the children of expats and the upper class. If I was a parent whose child had gone to school at that time, I would be raising hell regarding the school’s hiring policy, its background checks, and the silence it has maintained over one of its former teachers being jailed for pedophilia. Furthermore, Smith was apparently also volunteering at an orphanage and some of the images found on his computer are from the orphanage. It’s a tragedy that Nepal allows just any foreigner to come to Nepal and work with vulnerable children without so much as a Google search into who the person is. There are barely any safeguards in place and any nosy officials can always be bribed to stay silent. There is growing suspicion that there are numerous expats in Nepal who solicit sex and sexual images from children and it could very likely be the case, given how many in the past have been arrested and jailed.

One last thing before we move to the deep dive. In last week’s newsletter, I mentioned how India had halted the export of all non-Basmati rice in order to prepare for the impacts of El Nino. Now, a novel situation has emerged. Nepal is reportedly willing to trade tomatoes for rice. India is currently reeling from a shortage of tomatoes due to poor rainfall and disease. So it has started importing tomatoes from Nepal, one of the few crops that grow in abundance here. Nepal, for its part, is looking to exchange the tomatoes for rice, which it imports in the millions of tons from India. Nepal is looking towards the upcoming festival season when it will require a surplus of rice while India is looking to curb growing inflation. This should be a win-win for both sides if a deal comes through.

And I think that about does it for this week’s round-up. Now on to our primary programing.

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The deep dive: Kathmandu drowns every monsoon

Photo: ICIMOD

Monday night, it began to rain and by Tuesday morning, it was still raining. The rivers and streams, once sluggish with sewage and garbage, began to swell, flush with the new rain. The waters rose and the rivers breached their banks, spilling out onto the streets and into homes. At Teku, Samakhusi, Kapan, Thapathali, Balaju, Kalimati, and parts of Patan and Bhaktapur, buildings were inundated and homeowners had to seek shelter on higher ground. Almost all of Kathmandu’s major rivers and streams — the Bagmati, Bishnumati, Dhobi Khola, Hanumante, Samakhusi, Manohara — flooded, destroying much property and injuring two. Over 30 people had to be rescued from their water-logged homes.

Scenes of a flooded Kathmandu littered newspapers, media outlets, and social media but this is nothing new. It happens every year during the monsoon. Certain areas, like Kapan or Teku, routinely flood, sometimes even during the dry season when there is a freak thunderstorm. Less than an hour of continuous heavy rainfall is enough to turn most city streets into streams, even if they’re not close to any rivers. According to hydrologists, there is a danger of flooding when an area receives 60mm of rain in an hour as the ground becomes unable to absorb the excess water which runs off the surface instead of seeping into the ground. In Kathmandu, even 30mm of rain in an hour leads to flooding. On Monday night and Tuesday morning, the Budhanilkantha weather station measured a total of over 84mm of rain while Kathmandu as a whole received over 64mm of rain on average.

There is no real big mystery here as to why this happens. First, Kathmandu floods because there’s nowhere for the rainwater to go. The Kathmandu Valley is heavily concretized with very few green spaces. This means that the rainwater is not absorbed into the ground; it simply runs off the concrete and the tarmac and pools onto the sides of the streets. Usually, this is where the drains here. The drains direct the flow of water away from the streets and homes towards existing water bodies. Unfortunately, most of these drains don’t exist anymore. Every year, the streets are dug up multiple times, sometimes by the Road Department, other times by the Department of Water Supply and Sewerage. Each time, the drains are either destroyed or blocked, or just paved over. Each company contracted to dig up the roads leaves it worse off. And the drains that do exist are often so clogged with garbage that they barely qualify as drains anymore.

The problem is exacerbated by the fact that these days, buildings do not have green spaces anymore. The price of real estate is so astronomical in Kathmandu that most landowners try to make optimum use of that space — by constructing commercial buildings that occupy every inch of the space available. Plants and greenery for beautification can go on the roof or inside the building itself. Even when there are trees outside, they’re surrounded by tiles or concrete with just the trunk poking out. And even in homes, gone are the days of the small garden or a patch of grass for the kids to play on. Most homes, even when they have the space, tend to pave over them for aesthetic purposes. So again, the rainwater has nowhere to go and ends up pooling wherever it can, turning roads and thoroughfares into temporary streams.

The second reason for the flooding in the Valley is the rampant encroachment of the rivers. The Kathmandu Valley has numerous rivers that run through its length, often cutting through the heart of the city. For much of the year, these rivers are more akin to sewers, filled with sewage and garbage, sluggish, barely anything alive in their waters. But during the monsoon, they come alive, rejuvenated by the rains. Suddenly, these slow-moving sewers turn into roaring rivers, the waters rising high and angry, threatening to devastate anything caught in their path.

Earlier, when the Kathmandu Valley was still composed of mud-and-brick cities dotted with fields and ponds, most settlements were built on the highlands next to major rivers, called tar (टार) in Nepali, which is why many areas still contain the word in their names. For instance, Baluwatar lies on the highland next to the Ichhunadi. While homes were built on these tars, the lowlands or the flood plains of the rivers were primarily used for farming. Since the flood waters deposited rich alluvial soil on these plains, they were excellent areas for farming. This practice also left the rivers unmolested. During the monsoons, when the river inevitably flooded, they turned wide and shallow. As Tom Robertson quotes in his excellent Nepali Times article about why Kathmandu floods every year:

A birder's description of the Bishnumati River from a century and a half ago startled me. "The stream is always shallow, and its channel, though tolerably wide, is for the most part hardly lower than the adjoining cultivated land," wrote a foreign visitor in the 1870s. The Bishnumati 150 years later mostly flows three metres below walls on both sides.

The Bagmati has also become a new river. In the 1870s, the visitor noted that it had ‘a very wide channel’ and the water spread out according to its wishes and needs. ‘Even during the rains,’ he said, the water was shallow, only ‘knee-deep’.

Since then, urbanization in the Valley has grown unchecked and unmanaged. Every inch of land in the Valley has been parceled off and sold, including the land on the flood plains and the literal banks of the rivers. In their quest to claim as much land as they can, unscrupulous actors have restricted the rivers into narrow streams with large embankments that constrict the flow of the river. It is in the nature of a river to meander but when stuffed into a tiny channel, it grows angry. The slow and lazy meander becomes a fast torrential flow that causes much more damage to anything it encounters. Even a concrete home cannot withstand thousands of cubic meters of water crashing into it with such force. Furthermore, the rivers have either been mined for their sand and silt or have had their vegetation eaten away by sewage, leaving only a smooth rocky floor with nothing to stem the speed of the water’s flow.

Even seasonal streams, khahare khola (खहरे खोला), have been covered up with concrete and forced underground with roads and buildings built on top. These streams too were once lifelines during the monsoon as they collected rainwater runoff from the settlements and diverted it into bigger streams and rivers like the Bagmati and Bishnumati. These streams might seem dead but during the monsoon, they too come alive with a vengeance. As Minket Lepcha quoted in her also excellent article for The Record about Boudha and its relationship with water: “You trouble the khahare and the khahare troubles you.”

Over the decades, multinational organizations and donor countries have funded numerous plans for the ‘development’ of the Kathmandu Valley. Recommendations like the institution of a 20-meter greenbelt on either side of major rivers have been roundly ignored while dangerous ones, like the Dhobi Khola corridor and the Bagmati corridor road projects, have been swiftly approved and inaugurated to much fanfare. This was the state of the Dhobi Khola corridor on Tuesday morning.

These days, there is a tendency to attribute all ‘natural’ disasters to climate change. But the flooding in Kathmandu is not the result of climate change, although it might have contributed somewhat to the effects. Kathmandu has been flooding for eons, ever since the first settlements here. But in the old days, the residents knew how to account for such flooding and prepared accordingly. Those days are long gone. Profit and capital now trump all environmental concerns.

Suppose people like Mayor Balen Shah are actually interested in making Kathmandu a truly livable city. In that case, it is not going to be enough to bulldoze structures that encroach on the rivers and uproot the squatters living on the riverbanks. Much more far-reaching measures will need to be taken. These include strict implementation of a sizeable greenbelt on each side of rivers based on their yearly flow; construction of proper drainage canals and daily maintenance of these canals to clear them of any obstructions; elimination of the high walls that jacket rivers and streams; and the creation of a flood hazard map and identification of hotspots.

What it all really comes down to is an understanding of our own hubris. We cannot tame nature; it is foolish to even try. Rivers don’t care for settlements or human lives. In the grand scheme of things, we mean nothing to the earth. If we don’t learn to live alongside nature, we will end up destroyed by it.

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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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