Kathmandu: an urban nightmare

ASIA FILE

From atop a four-storey apartment block that rose like a swollen thumb from a neighbourhood of shanties, garbage dumps and overgrown fields in Bijeswori, the urban sprawl of Kathmandu looked as impressive as the hills that surround it like the walls of a bowl.

As far as I could see, within the 360-degree circle of vision, an unbroken grey mass of buildings seemed to fill every nook and corner.

The apartment block belonged to an old friend, a former UN consultant, and he told me that hardly 20 per cent of the Kathmandu valley remained vacant.

He might have been overstating a little, but the fact is the Nepalese capital is growing at the rate of some 15,000 new buildings a year and its population, expanding by over 6 per cent a year, has already crossed 1.6 million.

There lies the problem. For the most part, this growth has been haphazard, with little or no regard to planning. The buildings came before the services and the latter now are simply unable to cope.

Aside from some major roads that are rather well maintained, most of Kathmandu twists and turns around dusty alleyways that are often unpaved and too narrow for even two Maruti 800s to pass side by side.

Every time a car drives by, clouds of dust rise from their open shoulders to choke pedestrians and join the haze that seems to hang permanently over the city.

And this isn't just pure dust. It's mixed with noxious fumes from the city's ever-growing population of motor vehicles and smoke from its brick kilns and cement, textile, soap and chemical industries. There's no concerted effort to improve the environment and, in the valley's peculiar air system, there's no way the pollution can quickly disperse.

It sort of remains permanently trapped, forcing an increasing number of people, including the young, to suffer from chronic pulmonary diseases. Foreigners coming to live and work in Nepal have been known to leave soon afterwards, fearing that their children would develop asthma from the continuous exposure to particulate pollution.

Yes, there are new cars in Kathmandu, well-designed buildings with pleasing brick facades, exotic speciality restaurants, great-looking boutique hotels, organic food shops catering to discriminating buyers, and supermarkets stocked with all kinds of foreign goods. If developed properly, some parts of it could even look like a slice of Europe.

But it's the unrelieved dullness of grey dust that pervades every visitor's memory. It mutes even the brightest of colours and turns roadside bushes and trees into ghosts of winter.

One other haunting memory of Kathmandu that I carried back from a recent visit is that of a practically dead Bagmati river that still somehow survives as a sewer. Driving back from Bijeswori, along a bumpy embankment road that has remained unfinished for years, my friend pointed to a spot on the river and said: "That used to be our family cremation place. Now we don't even dare to touch its water."

On the river's bed, only a few isolated puddles remained from its original flow. Huge piles of garbage lay rotting around them. At places, it was difficult to distinguish the riverbed from its banks.

Almost everywhere, the soil in the riverbed had turned black from years of indiscriminate dumping of untreated domestic sewage, industrial effluents and agricultural residues and chemicals.

I have no explanation for this gross neglect. What could have been a gem of a city, in one of the most beautiful natural settings in the world, is beginning, through inaction, to turn into an urban nightmare. It's a pity, because environmental awareness in Kathmandu is perhaps greater than in any other city in the subcontinent.

More and more people are getting to use solar panels to meet their domestic energy needs. Diesel-run auto-rickshaws have been banned in the valley and replaced by battery-operated three-wheelers called "safa tempos" (clean tempos), and an alliance between the government and several non-government organisations (NGOs), called Kathmandu Electric Vehicle Alliance, has been formed to increase public awareness and support for electric vehicles.

Since April 2002, a new NGO, called Friends of the Bagmati and patronised by none other than Britain's Prince Philip, has been at work to rally people to come to the rescue of the heavily endangered waterway.

But Kathmandu's problems have gone beyond such occasional tinkering. Perhaps it is the tinkering that's deepening them. Nepal is so overwhelmed by NGOs running programmes and projects that the government seems to have slipped into the false belief that everything is going to be all right. It's not going to be all right. NGOs alone can't change a country.

The government needs to come down with a sledgehammer to put things into shape. It's only emergency government action, with international help, that can save Kathmandu, and of such an action, unfortunately, there's not yet any sight.