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South Asia goes through periodic droughts and floods in the same year. Why hasn’t it occurred to us that this is a paradox? How can a continent reeling from water shortage suddenly be inundated with an overabundance of rain, which leads to annual floods? Often, this phenomena is happening in contiguous areas only a few kilometers apart.

I was consulting for the World Bank between 2008-2010, and I remember the then director of World Bank in Nepal, Susan Goldmark, saying that South Asia would never get out of this drought and flood cycle till it managed its monsoon—storing high volumes of rainwater in the high season, withdrawing during the low season. This bit of common sense came to me as a shock when I first heard it. I think about that moment and wonder if we’ve always taken these “natural calamities” for granted, as acts of god and nature which we cannot change. But as Goldmark pointed out, it may just be an issue of policy and management which will end this cycle.

Our ancestors were brilliant and much more technically savvy than us in harvesting rainwater. The dhungay-dhara technology, a Newari invention, stores water in underground channels and withdraws it year around. It is a marvel whose workings were hidden by those who made it so that enemies could not locate its source and disable the water system when attacking a city. Perhaps it is because of this that the system fell into disuse, because only a few were privy to its workings. There’s a channel to recharge underground reservoirs, and a system to filter the water as it goes down.

Anybody who’s dealt with today’s pumps, electric motors and ozone filters, which frequently go bust and need constant repair and electricity, can’t but admire this technology that operates seamlessly. In the last year, I have invested Rs 80,000 ($800) in an underground pump, Rs 30,000 ($300) in a filter, and Rs 24,000 ($240) in an ozone filter for my kitchen. They all work sporadically and need constant repair. The ozone filter requires a Rs 3,500 filter change every six months. I changed it two months ago and the last few days I haven’t had any water coming out. I have reverted to my older filter with a ceramic candle in order to get a few liters of clean water.

No wonder it’s much easier to go out and buy a plastic canister, which will last for a while and comes with a guarantee of purity and freshness. The gentleman in charge of bringing water to the Kathmandu Valley, Surya Raj Kandel, is now engaged in the bottled water business. Kandel is the Executive Director of Melamchi Water Supply Project, and a majority shareholder at Crystal Aqua Service Private Limited. In any country, this is a flagrant violation of ethics and conflict of interest. In Nepal, nobody blinks, probably because the gentleman in question is part of the ruling party, and his wife is the registered owner.

All throughout the monsoon, as the rain fell incessantly, I could hear the roar of diesel jeeps parking outside my house, full of plastic water tanks. This fossil fueled absurdity makes no sense, especially when clean water fell without pause from the sky.

To imagine a city of 1.3 million (with some estimating that the Lalitpur and Bhaktapur districts have an additional four million residents) will get their water through diesel tankers is not just stupid, but also criminal in the age of climate change. I don’t know if UNFCCC has anything to say about that, but they should put out an advisory to Third World countries like Nepal which have fallen off the sustainability rails regarding the use of fossil fuels to ferry water into cities.

Besides heating the atmosphere and making it unbearable for urban residents, these thousands of tankers spew daily air pollution, affecting our health. We pay a high price for a public utility like water through the added tax of petrol and diesel, all of which ends up in the exchequer of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE, the countries which are enslaving our people in the first place.

How did a country with an overabundance of water become dependent on a complex web of fossil fuel, sold by undemocratic authoritative regimes, to get its drinking water? We have to look at neighbor India as a culprit as well—it has aggressively extended its motorcycles, trucks, tankers, and petrol pipelines into Nepal, bringing Modinomics (including a far too jovial relationship with petrol tyrants of Central Asia) into our country. If we are to separate ourselves from this tangled web, let us start with what we’ve always known—our own indigenous technology.

What we need is government policy which mandates rainwater harvesting, and reliable companies that can provide professional service. Unfortunately Nepal government is too busy collecting taxes and fees from migrant workers to think about training them in this essential work. So we continue to limp onwards, a city (and increasingly, a country) flooded by Himalayan rivers and the monsoon which is also captive to the fossil fuel and bottled water lobby.

Nepal government and aid agencies need to scale up technical trainings and regulatory mechanisms for traditional water harvesting and groundwater recharge, which is the only way dense cities like Kathmandu will have water in the future.

Days of heavy rainfall have resulted in severe flooding in Nepal’s southern plains. As of July 16, the floods left more than 78 people dead and countless families displaced. As a Chinese journalist working in Kathmandu, I feel the same sadness as the Nepali people. I spent my childhood by the Yangtze River; I know the horrors of floods.

My birthday is in the summer, and I still remember that particular one in 1998. That night, at 10 o’ clock, my parents were at home to celebrate. As I was about to blow out the birthday candles, my father’s beeper went off. My father said, “Sorry, a huge flood is coming. All civil servants of the city must gather now and go to check the levees and prepare for safe crossing of the flood peak.” The next day, when I came to the levees of my hometown, I saw that they had been raised by one meter with the help of sandbags overnight, and the swift current of Yangtze flowed downstream just below my feet.

During that flood season in 1998, there were eight flood peaks in the upper reaches of the Yangtze River. After they converged with the floods of middle and lower reaches, the basin saw its biggest flooding since 1954. At Wuhan, a megalopolis of 10 million people, 400 kilometers downstream from my hometown, the runoff reached 71,100 cubic meters per second. To put it another way, the flooding at that time could form one Phewa Lake every 10 minutes. If the levees burst, the densely populated Jianghan plain would become a vast ocean.

At this critical moment, the central government immediately mobilized hundreds of thousands of PLA soldiers and armed police to fight floods. Under the strong leadership of the party and the government, and unremitting efforts of the army, the Chinese people achieved a great victory against the floods in 1998.

Water is the source of life, nurturing civilizations. But water is temperamental too. When cold air from Siberia meets warm, moist air from the Pacific, there is seasonal rainfall over China. If these two streams of air are evenly matched in one place for a long time, rain will continue to fall, followed by flooding, and drought. Therefore, as a large agricultural country, fighting floods and drought has been one of the main tasks of China’s internal affairs for thousands of years.

China’s diplomacy and military struggles have also traditionally been about water. The 15-inch isotropic line divides the East Asian landmass between farming and nomad areas. If the cold air from Siberia is too strong, the rainfall areas on the Chinese mainland move south. The northern nomads lived in cold and dry areas, and they could have invaded agricultural areas in the south to survive.

So organizing the whole country’s power to prevent the invasion of northern nomads was one of the most important parts of the Chinese government’s diplomatic and military struggles for thousands of years. The Great Wall was thus built to keep the nomads at bay.

Whether it is to overcome natural disasters or resist aggression, huge manpower, material and financial resources needed to be mobilized in China. In order to maintain such a large country and ensure the continuation of its civilization, a strong central government had become a historical necessity.

There are many legends of the floods from ancient times, such as the story of Noah’s ark in the Bible and of Yu the Great, the head of a Chinese tribal alliance, who controlled floods about 4,000 years ago. In Yu’s time, China’s Yellow River basin flooded every year, and Shun, the leader of the tribal alliance, appointed Yu to take charge of flood control. Yu commanded all the tribes, and after 20 years of unremitting efforts, successfully diverted annual floods to areas not harmful to human beings. Through the flood-fighting process, Yu gradually united the tribes and after Shun died, eventually founded China’s first dynasty, the Xia. From that time, ancient China began to evolve from a tribal alliance state into a state with strong central government.

Some historians say water shaped China’s traditional politics. In fact, this form of politics with a strong central government plays a positive role to this day. In the 1960s, China developed atomic and hydrogen bombs and successfully launched man-made satellites despite its weak economy and poor technological strength. With the help of modern technology, this political tradition has played a great role in fighting floods also.

In 2006, the Three Gorges project, the world’s largest dam, was completed. In addition to helping with power generation and shipping, the project has a total water storage capacity of 133.2 billion cubic meters. If the floods of 1998 were to recur, the threat to people in the Yangtze basin will be greatly reduced. The 200-billion-yuan construction cost, relocating a million people in the reservoir area, the collective support of China’s scientific and engineering institutions—all these efforts called for a strong central government.

In Elements of the Philosophy of Right, German philosopher Hegel states: ‘What is reasonable is real; that which is real is reasonable’. The current state of each country is the result of its living environment, historical tradition and other factors. Because of this, the world is colorful and full of charm.

The author is chief correspondent of the Kathmandu office of Shanghai Wen Hui Daily. He has a Masters in international relations

With over 70 confirmed deaths from floods and landslides over the past one week, it may be hard to see how the early warning systems installed on the rivers of the Tarai region could have worked. But most of them did. On their basis, the flood forecasting division of the Department of Hydrology and Meteorology had sent countless flood alerts when rainfall had started crossing dangerous levels in parts of the Tarai in the second week of July. These alerts were broadcast over FM and TV stations, social media and even sent as SMS to those living in flood-prone areas. And yet there was such widespread death and destruction. What
went wrong?

One surprising hindrance to effective long-range communication in Nepal is its unfinished transition from a unitary state to a federal one. There is still no clarity about the distinct functions and responsibilities of each of the three tiers of the government, nor a clear channel of communication from the center to the federal level, or vice versa. Effective flood-control, as Lin Ning argues in an article for APEX this week, is a centralized affair. A central nodal agency must be able to clearly coordinate and communicate with all the affected provinces.

But there is little or no coordination between the two levels in Nepal. It is thus not surprising that most SMS flood alerts sent from Kathmandu to vulnerable Tarai residents never reached them. Another problem has been with the elevated infrastructures built along the border by India, resulting in inundation in Nepal during the monsoons. There are joint commissions to address this kind of issue, but to no avail. The Indians in these commissions seem lukewarm. The Nepalis there, not plucky enough to strongly make their case.

Regional mechanisms like the SAARC Disaster Management Center in Gujarat have been of limited help as well. At a time when a high level of regional coordination is needed to collectively fight the ravages of climate change, even existing regional climate bodies are withering on SAARC’s deathbed. Nepal blaming India for high border infrastructures while the Indian news channels chide Nepal for opening the sluice gates of the Koshi Barrage to flood Bihar will take us nowhere. This is a multifaceted problem. Installing good early warning systems is just a start.

When the issue of government flip-flop on testing pesticides level on imported Indian vegetables flared up earlier this month, Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli apologized for misleading the public about an Indian Embassy letter, and for implying that the government acted on its own when it reversed its earlier stance on the matter. He blamed civil servants and his ministers for keeping him in the dark about the Indian letter. This is not the first instance an elected prime minister of this country has rued about being misinformed, and his inability to get things done and govern, and this certainly will not be the last time.

All governments since 1990 have ignored the fundamental problem of governance in Nepal: the failure to accumulate power in state organs and in subsequent institution building for the use of this power. Instead, they all focused on leveraging the power they individually had to reward supporters—in the process weakening even the few institutions that had been built by past authoritarian regimes.
The legitimate coercive power of the Nepali state has hence been limited even in the best of times. Government authority simply does not emanate from a piece of paper. It is instead earned and accumulated through its use over time through instruments of trust, fear, or both.

While most states excel in one or the other, or both, the Nepali state has never been particularly good at either. There is little trust in state institutions or leaders who preside over them. Hence the continuous opposition to government efforts to exercise its prerogatives—from the Guthi Bill to the decision to host the IIFA awards.

As government leaders wonder why they can’t even move a needle with their two-thirds mandate, perhaps reading Samuel P. Huntington’s seminal book, ‘Political Order in Changing Societies,’ written nearly six decades ago, could be instructive.
To govern and govern well, a society needs strong political institutions to define and realize public interests. But political institutions have “moral as well as structural dimensions… morality requires trust; trust involves predictability; and predictability requires regularized and institutionalized patterns of behavior,” writes Huntington.

The behaviors of our institutions are predictable in a sense that they can be trusted to make decisions or appointments that serve private interest of the leaders—which are clearly amoral and offer no public good. Hence there is opposition even to decisions made with the best of intent. The past is seen as an indicator of the future.

That is largely true. Successive prime ministers and ministers compete to outdo his/her predecessors and the resultant vicious cycle delivers repeated blows to our institutions as new sets of leaders, or rather recycled ones, come in rather frequently—leaving the institutions in tatters. This is evident in ambassadorial appointments to the behavior of leaders in the country’s oldest university. Who appoints them and how? What is their goal once they occupy these high offices?
The biggest challenge for us as a society is to persuade government leaders, civil servants, and politicians to distinguish their individual interest from institutional interest. While to suggest that leaders not pursue private interest at all would be utopian, they should do so without compromising larger institutional interests they preside over. Leave the office you occupy better than what you came into. In other words, educating leaders about individual legacy—not inheritance for the family—can be a good starting point.

Given how appointments are made, or to put it more bluntly, paid for, and inherent unpredictability of the tenure or term of appointment, the overwhelming drive among public officials is to recuperate the investment and leverage the position for personal gain before their time is up. With collection of such individuals in the key governing structures, one wonders how anything that promotes public good gets done in this country.

It will be an uphill battle to change the structure and culture even if we are lucky enough to have an enlightened leadership committed to a complete overhaul. This can start through a discourse around how to fix things, and by intellectuals affiliated to political parties speaking truth to power. Unfortunately, that is becoming a very high bar in even matured democracies—as social media form echo chambers that reinforce your worldviews rather than create informed public spheres