Ben’s Blog

This is an update to a previous post about access to water in Dhading District.

Short summary of the previous post:

1) 35 years ago a Kumal community built an irrigation channel. (Kumals are one of Nepal’s ethnic minorities and generally experience worse health, education and economic outcomes than Nepal’s average – and being at the average in Nepal is no great place to be).

2) Five years later a high-caste community built an irrigation channel in a way that diverted all the water away from the Kumal’s channel. This was not legal at the time, but there you go.

3) In the last 2 years the Kumals and a local NGO network have tried many things to get fair and secure access to water for irrigation:

• They engaged in countless meetings and dialogues to bring about reconciliation and a fair agreement between the two communities. Of course, the community with all the water was happy to talk endlessly with the community with none of the water. So these meetings didn’t achieve very much.
• They established a users committee to organise the community. This committee was highjacked by the high-caste community who managed to get one of their own members elected to the Kumal’s own committee.
• They spoke with the media about the situation. But after the brief discomfort brought about by the public attention had faded, the high-caste community went right back to ignoring the water sharing agreement they had come to.

Since then, though, the Kumals have continued to organise and take action. They took their case to the District’s Chief Development Officer and called on him to take action. In response to their lobbying, the CDO sent a team of engineers from the water ministry to visit the site and survey the two channels. Both communities were also asked to give an account of the amount of land in each place.

The Kumals hope that this information will be used to determine a fair allocation of water to each community and guide the engineers when they come to rebuild the two channels. Let’s hope that’s how it works. There are several ways that the Kumals could still be denied justice. The land tallies might be inaccurate or misrepresented. The work on the channels might be delayed. Or it might be done without proper regard to the communities’ needs.

But by continuing to speak up the Kumals are paving the way for change. Not only a change in the irrigation infrastructure available in the village. Nor only the nutrition and health benefits that will come when the water is available. Also a change in the Kumals’ own self-understanding and perception of their place in the world.