Talking to this daily, Senior Water Resources Specialist at the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) Mandira Singh Shrestha said that proper assessment of carrying capacity of fragile mountain ecosystem needs to be made while planning, designing and developing infrastructures.
The damage caused to over a dozen government offices including the district hospital and police offices in Khalanga as well as the road connecting the district headquarters has raised question mark over infrastructure planning. Khalanga was disconnected for five days due to road blockages and bad weather, which prevented Nepal Army´s helicopters from flying to Khalanga.
ICIMOD in its recent report on the Mahakali flood said had the Khalanga infrastructures planned properly, the damaged would have been much less. In the report, titled 2013 Monsoon Floods in Nepal and India: What happened and what could have been done?´ ICIMOD further said, “Large stretches of road and settlements were washed away stranding thousands of people and raising questions about their design, construction, and monitoring. Infrastructure development in the mountains has to be undertaken with caution and proper planning, and must apply different standards to that in the plains.”
“We should not only focus our attention to the problems at the time of disasters but rather consider the risk factors, vulnerabilities and preparedness in advance. Proper early warning systems can reduce the adverse impacts of disasters and that disaster risk reduction should not be in isolation but be a part of the development process” added Shrestha. ICIMOD defined the Mahakali flash flood worst event of the last fifty years in the river.
However spokesman at the Ministry of Physical Planning Mukti Gautam said the Mahakali flooding should be seen as unexpected natural disaster. “We plan medium-scale infrastructure like the Baitadi-Darchula road by taking into consideration the hydraulic calculation of 50 years. But the recent flooding was quite unexpected,” said Gautam.
However, Mahakali´s is not an isolated case of infrastructure damage by flood, a flooding in the Sunkoshi River in 1981 had washed away a stretch of the Araniko Highway from Barhabishe to Tatopani and a concrete bridge over the Bhotekoshi River and also caused huge damage to the Sunkoshi Hydropower Project. Likewise a 1993 flood had washed away three concrete bridges along the Prithvi Highway.
Director General of the Department of Water-Induced Disaster Prevention Pradip Raj Pande is of the view that that flood damage can be reduced through construction of proper embankments and spurs in the Mahakali River. “The budget provided for flood control is too less. We need more budget for taming the river properly,” added Pande. For this fiscal year, the department received Rs 2.64 billion from the government. “We need at least Rs 5-6 billion budget for the management of some 14 big rivers that are prone to flooding,” informed Pande.
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