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Country Water Action: Nepal
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Less than a 30-minute drive outside Kathmandu, life in the town of Madhyapur Thimi unfolds in scenes more common to a different century.
On this particular evening, a group of elderly residents sit outside the Bisnubir Temple offering incense, chants, strings and flutes that usher in dusk. A barefoot couple work a small corner plot of land with hand tillers. People stoke small fires inside their centuries old homes and mount candles outside. Women huddle together, hunched over, bundling grain, hay, and vegetables for the night delivery to a Kathmandu market. Women draw water from a well.
To the unfamiliar visitor, life in Thimi is idyllic. But one look down Thimi’s main river shows that something is not right.
“When I was a young boy, I used to swim and bathe in that river,” said Mr. Madan Krishna Shrestha, former mayor of Thimi. “Then the donor groups came and sanitation systems came. But when one of the treatment plants broke down, almost suddenly, the river got dirty.”
One by one the other plants fell into disrepair until they stopped functioning altogether. Sewage is now dumped untreated into streams, like what is done in the whole of Kathmandu and surrounding towns.
What has happened to Thimi’s river is happening to water resources across the world. They are carrying loads nature never intended for them—tons of silt from erosion, industrial pollutants, agricultural chemicals and untreated sewage.
Improving sanitation and wastewater treatment systems is one of many interventions that can help save natural resources while improving people’s immediate environment. Almost one half of people living in Asia and the Pacific do not have access to improved sanitation. Target 10 of the Millennium Development Goals call for this number to be halved by 2015.
The Environment and Public Health Organization (ENPHO) in Nepal is trying to revolutionize the way municipal governments approach their water pollution problems.
For years, ENPHO has watched local governments struggle with the financial and technical capacity to manage the more modern and sophisticated sanitation and wastewater treatment systems that donor money has bought them. As an alternative and where it is feasible, ENPHO works with communities and local governments to adopt low technology solutions. The logic: Keeping systems simple keeps them affordable and manageable—the two keys to sustainability.
ENPHO concentrates on two modalities to improve sanitation and wastewater treatment:
ENPHO’s market for Ecosan projects is wherever there are not already flush toilets, mostly low-caste households. Mrs. Bina Kapali, a 45-year-old woman, had to resort to humiliating practices before receiving an Ecosan unit from ENPHO. Kapali used the lot next to her house—the town garbage dump, where dogs and pigs trod and scavenge for food scraps.
“When we used to have to go there—at that dumpsite, I would sit there, hidden, and think, ‘What if somebody comes, especially a man? If only I had a toilet, I would not be doing this here,” Kapali said.
Since receiving an Ecosan unit, “I have never gone back to that dumpsite,” she said.
She has also never recycled the waste from the Ecosan storage units for fertilizer, like what is encouraged of users. “I cannot,” she said. “These flowers are for the gods. I don’t want to throw urine on them.”
“There will always be cultural factors that even the best technology can’t get around,” said Dr. Roshan Raj Shrestha, founder and former director of ENPHO and now Chief Technical Director for UN-HABITAT’s Water for Asian Cities Program. “We have to do a lot of work on social acceptance … In the rural farming areas, everybody uses cow dung. They love it. But attach the same idea to a toilet and nobody wants it.”
By the end of 2005, ENPHO estimates it will have installed more than 150 Ecosan units in low caste households in the Kathmandu Valley.
The market for ECOSAN in the Kathmandu Valley is limited. “It’s too late for Ecosan in Thimi,” Shrestha said. The infrastructure for a sewage system is already in place and 90 percent of homes have flush toilets. The greater problem is in treating the wastewater. Here is where reed beds offer nature’s low-cost, low-maintenance, sustainable solution.
Getting people to buy the idea, however, is a project in itself.
“Whether it’s Nepal or the United States, nobody likes the idea of a sewer plant in the area. ‘Not in my backyard,’ as the saying goes,” Shrestha said.
To help overcome the skepticism, ADB gave ENPHO a $50,000 grant from its Pilot and Demonstration Activities fund to pilot the reed bed system and use it as a demonstration site for other communities to see and believe from.
The startup money only went so far before ENPHO faced trouble on every other front. In early 2005, when ENPHO needed political support to convince the community to accept the project, the king dissolved all elected officials.
In other political corners, Shrestha said ENPHO was pressured to use some of the grant money to construct a building for a separate organization in the project area. “When we refused, all sorts of problems started. And basically, the project fell through. We tried community mobilizations. We went door-to-door. Nothing worked,” he said.
Eventually, ENPHO turned their plans toward a different site in Thimi. “Since 90 percent of the people in Thimi are Newari, it was easier to convince them. They are mostly one caste. It’s a homogenous place and consensus is easier,” Roshan Shrestha said.
In a strategic move, ENPHO first gained the support of the worshippers at the Bisnubir Temple, whose influence went far. Local volunteer labor has since built the reed bed system in just a few months, finishing in October 2005.
Local officials believe this could be the start of municipal-wide scheme. “This is a small town,” a deputy mayor said. “This kind of system is manageable and can be a model.”
To bring 100 percent treatment to Thimi and plug a major pollution source, officials estimate that it would take just eight more reed beds, at a cost of less than $25,000 each and only a few months to implement each one.
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