BHASWOR OJHA/KANTIPU
Chief Secretary Leela Mani Poudyal (pic, right) has demonstrated that passion and perseverance do yield results. Nearly one year into the citizens’
Bagmati cleaning campaign the river and its tributaries are still as smelly as ever, but at least the trash is gone from the filthiest stretches along its banks.
However, the single most important achievement of this campaign may be to restore the faith in the people that
cleaning up the once holy rivers of Kathmandu Valley is doable. And the symbolism is great: if a river can be cleaned up maybe governance in this country can
be too.
Compared to cleaning the Ganga in India which carries industrial waste and other toxic pollutants from the densely populated plains through which it flows, restoring the Bagmati to its pristine state is very much possible.
There have been attempts to clean the Bagmati in the past, but they all fizzled out mainly because they were momentary outbursts. Whether from a businessman’s angst during a family funeral or a high-profile trophy seeking city mayor, the motivation was there but sustained implementation was lacking.
That’s where the work of Chief Secretary Poudyal and the citizens’ campaign for river cleaning stands out. It has so far got spontaneous public support, and is growing. But this and other popular movements will also grind to a halt if it doesn’t reach a critical mass. Volunteering every Saturday morning wading knee deep in the black muck would boost the morale of hundreds of other Kathmandu residents already there.
The Bagmati has been defaced by three activities as it flows through the city: dumping solid waste, emptying raw sewage and encroachment into its floodplain. The citizen’s campaign tackles the first.
A much-delayed project is underway to lay down sewer mains on both banks of the Bagmati and its tributaries so that sewage is diverted to treatment plants. Encroachment is a larger issue linked to urbanisation, vote banks and land mafia with political protection. This needs strong-willed leadership to solve.
The biggest danger now is the relapse factor. Parts of the rivers that have been cleaned have to remain that way. This calls for strict enforcement by those who live along its banks to apprehend the sly dumping of garbage from bridges under cover of night, and to enforce hefty fines.
There are the cynics who scoffed on social networking sites about the Chief Secretary literally taking the plunge to bathe in the Bagmati on New Year’s Day. The negativism got too much to bear, and Poudyal dashed off an op-ed in Kantipur this week. ‘Sitting in the sidelines to complain doesn’t help anyone,’ he noted, ‘all individual action adds up.’ Indeed, if nothing else, the media publicity around the citizen’s campaign has served to embarrass the municipality and the government whose real job it is to take care of the capital.
The larger question is whether it is the Chief Secretary’s job to get his hands dirty on weekends. Shouldn’t his time be better spent on attending to the structural governance lapses that has led to urban decay? Poudyal’s answer in his op-ed is: those who do nothing have no right to complain.
The Chief Secretary is prone to such lone wolf actions.
Three years ago, returning from his ancestral home in Gulmi after Dasain, he was so outraged by the damage done to the Prithvi Highway by overloaded tipper trucks that he took personal initiative as secretary at the Prime Minister’s Office to instruct three ministries to control overloading and repair the highway. As we know, things got much worse and the endless repairs are still continuing.
One can understand Poudyal’s frustration that even a highly placed official finds it difficult to get the creaky machinery of government to move. One must admire his perseverance to not wait for it to start doing its job, and to actually get his hands dirty to set an example.
@damakant
Read also:
The sewage canal SUNIR PANDEY
Reviving the river
Where the Bagmati is still clean