Nepal’s other material resource, much taken for granted, is its seemingly unbounded supply of fresh water, rapidly becoming a scarce commodity across the globe. An editorial in The Rising Nepal last week reported that a severe water crisis, caused by the inability of the Nepal Water Supply Corporation to meet demand, had worsened “as spring water sources … have been slowly drying up over the years” [47]. Here too, evidence of the failures of large-scale projects abound. The Melamchi project, intended to fulfill the water needs of Kathmandu, has proven to be a disaster. Sushma Joshi, a native of Kathmandu, writes:

The South Korean company contracted to do it bid so cheaply it is now unable to finish the work. Locals from the area are not compensated for the water that has been taken away, and they are unsure the project will leave them enough water for their own drinking needs.

If larger hydropower projects take hold in Nepal, as seems likely to happen, Sushma predicts that “unfair appropriation where water is diverted from areas without concern for local usage is sure to be the norm” [48].

The Road Ahead

Corporate executives, World Bank officials and government regulators spend considerable energy attempting to convince the Nepalese people that large-scale energy projects, with their inevitably hefty price tags demanding foreign investment and technical assistance, are needed to overcome chronic power shortages and stimulate “economic growth.” This sentiment is nicely summed up in a recent statement by the Independent Power Producers Association of Nepal (IPPAN):

The highly talked about potential of 42,000 Mw of installed capacity will require at least 100 billion dollars to develop. Neither the government nor the donor agencies are going to put up such large amounts for hydropower development, when there are other competing social requirements, e.g. health, transport and the education sector. There are no short-cuts and no free lunches; and these hydropower projects will have to be developed in a fully commercial manner [49].

The unmentioned assumptions inherent in this statement are manifold and need not be elaborated upon here. It is sufficient to note that there are far more effective — and far cheaper — alternatives readily available. Bikash Pandey, the Nepalese representative of Winrock International, writes:

Investment of a very large percentage of central government resources in medium and large hydropower projects with the support of multilateral and bilateral aid has left inadequate resources for alternatives such as micro-hydropower and solar PV.

Contrary to corporate claims, the latter types of projects “are much more likely to bring modern sources of energy within reach of 85% of the country’s population,” inhabitants who would otherwise not be supplied by the national grid [50]. Thapa similarly notes that “It is not true that we cannot overcome this difficulty without building hydropower stations … that have very large storage reservoir[s],” stressing that “for certain types of load it is far more economic to build diesel plants than other types of power stations” [51].

Similarly, in terms of drinking water supply, Joshi views the standard corporate line — that “mega hydro-projects would benefit all segments of society” — as a “fallacy,” pointing out that marginalized groups of society “will continue to suffer as long as the water gets routed to those who can pay in urban areas.” Kathmandu’s water storage problems can be solved, she notes, by methods as simple as repairing and maintaining old pipes: “Unmaintained pipes are major culprits in leaking precious water to the ground” [48].

Despite such small-scale alternatives, the corporate windfall from resource-intensive mega projects, traced to its ultimate destination in the pockets of wealthy foreign executives and compliant Nepalese regulators, exerts a powerful influence on government policy. Swarms of profit seekers, supported by the political backing of the world’s greatest superpower and its Asian heir apparent, have descended onto Kathmandu with the jewels of Nepal in their sight. It will take more than pliant communist leaders seeking “to give more profit to the capitalists” to stop them.(Bulatlat.com)

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