Clarification

With regard to the article "Bhaktapur Municipality starts clean-up drive" published in The Rising Nepal dated 15 May we would first like to congratulate the Municipality for this laudable effort. However, the news conveniently placed the entire responsibility for the deplorable fact of the pollution of the Hanumante River squarely on a foreign donor agency, in this case GTZ (German Technical Cooperation).

For reasons of fairness, I would be grateful if the widely read the Daily could put the record straight by publishing the following factual information:

The "German Project" referred to in the article was HMG’s "Bhaktapur Development Project(BDP)", which was supported by the German Government through its implementing agency GTC room 1974 to 1986.

Before the project started, there was no organised sewerage disposal available at all in Bhaktapur but only open defecation was practiced and some open surface drains existed, most of them not properly functioning and letting all the wastewater trickle down to the fields and rivers around the town. As elderly people surely will remember, Bhaktapur was a slum with very dangerous public health conditions.

With the project’s support, a complete flush sewerage system including two sewage treatment plants have been built, one plant upstream of the Hanuman Ghat for the South-eastern part of the town of Bhaktapur and one at Sallaghari in the west, for the rest of the old town. All the sewer lines had been connected to these treatment plants and no untreated sewage was emptied into any river. This was for some time the only functioning municipal sewage treatment system in the whole of Nepal (apart from the partial system for Kathmandu, built with World bank funding in the 1970ies, that fell dry after short time of operation.) The agency responsible for the maintenance and operation of these systems was the Nepal Water Supply Corporation (NWSC).

However, due to various reasons, most of them of organisational, behavioral and managerial nature, the main sewage collector along the Hanumante river indeed is stuck with silt and has remained disfunctional for many years now, thus contributing to the pollution of the river (which is compounded by solid waste dumping into the river).

HG has finally decided to hand over the complete sewage system from NWSC to Bhaktapur Municipality after years of struggle by GTZ and municipality to get the necessary cabinet decision made for this handing over. Bhaktapur Municipality has shown strong willingness to operate and maintain the system.

Dr. Ernst Reichenbach
Programme Coordinator
GTZ-"Urban Development Through Local Efforts" Programme (udle)
Kathmandu