As Nepal runs dry, communities tap water harvesting

When Sita Poddar wants some water, she walks from her home in Nepal’s Kathmandu Valley to a neighbouring town 15 minutes away, where she waits at the public tap in the yard of a temple.

She is usually in line for an hour before she can fill three 20-litre cans with brown, murky water - if she gets any at all. The tap runs for only two hours every five days.

“Sometimes I return empty-handed, because water doesn’t come through the tap or it stops coming out even before my turn comes,” said Poddar who lives in Taumadhi, a densely populated town in Bhaktapur district, southeast of Kathmandu.

“Even in the monsoon, I am struggling to quench my thirst.”

But two kilometres away, the residents of the town of Liwali enjoy clean water year-round, thanks to a rooftop rainwater-harvesting plant built in a disused earthquake camp.

For the past four years, Liwali residents have been collecting rainwater through a system of pipes connected to the zinc sheet roofs of shacks built as temporary housing after two huge earthquakes shook Nepal in 2015, explained resident Kamala Sitikhu.

The water is stored in a 106,000-litre underground tank, filtered and dispensed through a set of taps, and evenly shared among nearly 100 households, each of whom get 40 litres every other day, she said.

“Our situation was no different than Taumadhi’s. (But) now, we don’t have to go to a neighbouring town to get water,” Sitikhu said, lifting a water-filled can to her waist.

Rainwater harvesting projects like the one in Liwali could offer a solution to other thirsty towns, water experts say, as scientists warn a hotter climate will lead to more intense water shortages.

There are no recent figures on changes in groundwater levels in Bhaktapur.

But water experts say they are perilously low, largely due to overuse by local people, industries and the region’s water supplier, Kathmandu Upatyaka Khanepani Limited (KUKL), said Sangam Shrestha, a professor of water engineering and management at the Asian Institute of Technology in Thailand.

Rising temperatures driven by climate change are expected to exacerbate the problem, added Shrestha, whose research predicts that the average maximum temperature in Kathmandu Valley could rise by up to 3.8 degrees Celsius (6.84 Fahrenheit) by the end of this century.

Higher temperatures will affect water demand and how groundwater is recharged by rain, which means “the water shortage in Bhaktapur will get worse,” he warned.