Kathmandu: Water scarcity has made life difficult for residents in Kuinkel Thumka, a mountainous village in eastern Nepal, for years – a few months ago, when they began to capture excess rainfall during the monsoon season.
In the central hills, between the Himalayas and the Terai, an 850-people village is located in the Kavrepalanchok district of Bagmati province, where the International Center for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) introduced clay-cement ponds to store rain and runoff water. Is.
“We built a clay-cement tank in our village eight months ago and started collecting rain,” 53-year-old farmer Geeta Kuinkel told Arab News.
“Before this tank, we did not have enough water and our life was difficult. This was not enough for our cattle, household chores and irrigation. Now, water is enough,” she said.
“We don’t need to buy vegetables, we grow and eat vegetables from our home gardens.”
Inexpensive clay-cement conservation ponds in the region were constructed with the help of ICIMOD, an intergovernmental research center serving countries in the Hindu Kush Himalayan region, and the Center for Environmental and Agricultural Policy Research, Extension and Development (CEAPRED), a leading Nepali goes. Developmental NGO.
Ponds capture more rainfall during the monsoon, thereby providing water during longer dry periods, which has also been more frequent in the Himalayas in recent years, as South Asia faces unprecedented heat due to climate change. have to do.
ICIMOD water management expert Sanjeev Bhuchar told Arab News that more than 80 percent of Nepal’s 13 million population depended on mountain springs as their primary source of water. But the springs are drying up.
“In Nepal and other Himalaya-Hindu Kush countries, lack of springs is one of the major emerging water crises,” he said.
“There is increasing evidence that spring discharge is decreasing, or in some cases, stopping altogether.”
According to CEAPRED project coordinator Kiran Bhusal, within the last three years, more than 400 ponds have been built across the country.
“Farmers can easily make such tanks as the process is very simple. It is made from a mixture of clay, sand and cement,” he said. “It’s helping people a lot.”
Kamala Adhikari, another resident of Kuinkel Thumka, said that it cost the village about $160 to build a water conservation pond and the standard of living has changed since then.
“We didn’t have enough water to drink, we had to buy water from other areas,” she said.
“Now we can wash our clothes, use it for our cattle and even we can do farming, and earn money from it. This improved our financial condition. A lot of problems have been solved.”