THE Bagmati, one of nine rivers in the Kathmandu valley but its main source of drinking water and hydel power, is so heavily polluted, local residents have given it the unflattering sobriquet, "Toilet Bowl of the Valley". Though holy to the Hindus, who cremate their dead on its banks, the river has become the repository for untreated solid wastes and toxic effluents from the valley's carpet, cement, leather and plastics industries, a source for sand for the building industry and a work-place for washerfolk.

The condition of the Bagmati has been deteriorating since the 1950s, starting with the shift in building technology from brick and mud to sand, stone and cement. Taking advantage of a lack of legislation on quarrying, the sand and stone suppliers for the building industry ravaged the riverbed and its banks. "In some areas," disclosed Deepak Gyawali, a development consultant, "they are now digging below the riverbed for sand". As a result, three bridges in the valley have collapsed in the past five years and the foundations of most of the other bridges have been exposed to a depth of two to three metres.

The river itself is polluted by untreated waste being dumped into it daily. But reducing this volume of untreated waste is hardly likely to solve the problem of a polluted Bagmati, as Ajaya Dixit, editor of Water Nepal, explained, "The Bagmati, with a minimum winter-time flow of 0.06 cumecs, can hardly serve as an urban flush of the valley". Especially considering the Ganga's minimum flow is about 77 cumecs at Varanasi, where the river is rated extremely polluted.

The Nepal Water Supply Corp is seeking funds from various international agencies to clean up the Bagmati, but Shree Govind Shah, who heads a group called Save Bagmati Campaign, is sceptical. "They have been looking for funds for a decade now and nothing has come of it", said Shah. "Instead, they need to look within the country for the expertise to solve the problem". Shah blamed the river's dismal state on three decades of neglect and, in some cases, active complicity on the part of the authorities for excessive sand excavation, excessive waste dumping and illegal building construction on the river's banks.

Even though an Italian firm carried a study of the Bagmati in 1988 and noted a dramatic rise in pollution levels where the main river is joined by a tributary just outside Kathmandu, no other serious attempt was made to quantify the extent of pollution. The problem is many-faceted now, said Dixit, because "by the time the Bagmati has been joined by the Bishnumati (a tributary) at Teku and begins to wend its way to Chobar, the Bagmati is really an open sewer, with water quality standards in gross violation of the norms for oxygen content, organic pollution, nitrates, phosphates and coliforms (contamination by human faeces)".

One of the proposals made is to divert the Melamchi river, which flows northeast of Kathmandu, into the valley through a 27 km tunnel of 2.5 m diameter. The diverted water would be stored in a reservoir with 5 million cu m capacity to be constructed at Sundarijal. The estimated price tag for this project is NRs 10,000 (IRs 6,060) per individual Nepali, which is quite steep considering that most water projects in the hills have an investment cost of NRs 1,600 (IRs 970) per head and a national average for mechanised urban water supply systems of around NRs 4,500 (IRs 2,730) per head, Dixit said.

If all goes well, Melamchi water is expected to reach the valley in 2021. But even that late date may never materialise, according to Dixit, because an Australian consultancy firm contracted to do a project feasibility report "has identified severe deficiencies in the quality of Melamchi river water flow data". No more than eight flow-meter readings have been taken since a flow-measurement station was installed on the river in 1976. Quoting a western hydrologist, Dixit commented, "In Australia, the United States or Germany, a project of this magnitude, with less than three months of flow data, would not be considered even for initial scrutiny".