Activists demand new laws enabling equal access to water

For 40-year-old Parbati Shrestha and her family, it is an everyday struggle to find drinking water. She often has to skip her daily wage job to spend hours walking to, and queuing at, a public tap used by hundreds of villagers.

“We are literally surrounded by water but sadly are too powerless to do anything,” said Shrestha in her village of Gaigaura in Kaski District, 300km west of the capital, Kathmandu.

Gaigaura’s water sources are controlled by landlords who own huge plots of land, according to local peasant farmers, who said they were not even allowed to speak up for their right to access water.

The government estimates that 80 percent of families in rural areas have access to drinking water, but water rights activists dispute this, saying poor water management and political neglect and the current legal framework were to blame for water scarcity.

Local water activists’ group Forum for Water and Sanitation (NFWS) said the lack of laws enabling equal rights to water has long been a key problem: “Gaining access to water should first be established as a right, as that is a genuine humanitarian need,” said water activist Prakash Amatya of NFWS. It was the poor who were most affected, he said.

He said a new opportunity to rectify this had arisen in the wake of the November 2006 peace agreement between former Maoist rebels and the Nepalese government which ended a decade-long armed conflict.

Caste discrimination

“Now we need a new government which is aware of our problems and sensitive enough to understand the hardship we are going through every day,” said Mangal Biswakarma in Sipleneytara village, 300km west of Kathmandu.

We are literally surrounded by water but sadly are too powerless to do anything.

“The problem is much worse for low caste people like me who are still considered untouchable,” he said, adding that most of the landlords are high caste Nepalese known as Brahmins, who still follow the banned caste discrimination system in many parts of the country.

Many low caste people like Biswakarma, also known as ‘Dalits’, are not even allowed to touch public taps in many villages.

High caste landlords tell them if they have water problems they should buy the land from them and then bring in pipelines.

“How can we afford to do that when we don’t even have enough money to buy food and send our children to school?” asked Kali Shrestha.

While the problem of drinking water is acute, another problem is finding water for irrigation, said farmers. “Our only hope for better cultivation is rainwater. A lack of it will end our only source of livelihood,” said Shrestha.

nn/ar/cb