"I do not know if our hardship will ever end," said Ram Bahadur Thapa Magar, President of Simalgauri Consumers' Drinking Water and Cleanliness Committee, further adding, "Though we live in the city, the water crisis makes us feel like we live in a far-flung remote village."
The area has a water tap and a well to provide drinking water to the local population. However, due to growing settlement in the area, pressure on existing resources has increased yet new sources of water have not been developed, Magar noted.
Due to continued inaction by local authorities, the affected communities decided to form a Committee to take steps to resolve the water crisis.
The Committee is now planning to install pipelines to supply water from a nearby Kadaghari water source, store it in a water tank at Simalgauri and supply each household with the required water, Magar said, "We are planning to construct one 20,000 liter water tank and another 1,000 liter water tank to store water from Kadaghari and distribute this to locals of Rana village and Dalit settlements."
Locals are currently voluntarily digging the trenches to lay pipelines from Kadaghari to the site of where the tanks will be constructed. A person from each household is volunteering their labor for this effort, Magar noted.
"I am alone in the house. As fetching water is so time consuming, I do not have time to cook. I have been forced to go to work many times without eating," said an elderly woman at Simalgauri. Many other women nearby echoed her comments.
They have been forced to walk for several hours, often at dawn, to fetch water, leaving their daily chores undone.
The Prithivi Narayan Shah Urban Drinking Water Project , which is responsible for distributing water to the residents of the municipality, has been unable to meet rising demands. In areas where the project can help, poor local residents continue to suffer as they are unable to pay the cost for tap installation. The project charges Rs 40,000 to install a water tap, a charge many Dalit settlements are unable to meet. Krishna Bahadur Shirmal, a local, noted that the network of taps is yet to expand into such communities for this reason.
Narayan Prasad Acharya, chief of the Project, stated that the project is currently seeking other sources of water to meet the increasing demand. "We have been deliberating whether water from Daraudi River can be harnessed to ease the water shortage problem in the municipality," added he.
He said that if no alternative water resources are found immediately, residents of the municipality are likely to face a severe water crisis in the following days.
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