The meeting of the Joint Review mission of the Melamchi Water Supply Project (MWSP) started in Kathmandu today.

The meeting will review the progress of the project and discuss the schedule, working environment, safety, security and funding gap of the project.

Representatives of all donor agencies are participating in the meeting.

The meeting is the first meeting after Norway, one of the major donors of the project decided to pull-out its assistance worth USD 28 million following the controversial verdict of the Royal Commission for the Corruption Control (RCCC) to detain former Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba and the then Minister for Physical Planning and Works Prakash Man Singh citing irregularities in the project deal.

Norway is also participating in the meeting even after its decision to pull-out the assistance for the project.

“We are convincing Norway to reconsider its decision as the project is making good progress,” Sailesh Devkota, Environmental Engineer and deputy team leader of the meeting told Nepalnews.

According to Devkota the meeting will discuss the ways to fill the resource gap if Norway did not reconsider its decision.

The representatives of the donor agencies will hold talks with the representatives of National Planning Commission, Ministry for Physical Planning and Works, Ministry of Finance and board members of MWSP during the meeting about the progress of the project.

The MWSP is an inter basin water supply project which supplies water from snow fed Melamchi river in Sindupalchowk district to the Kathmandu valley. The Project is designed to solve the chronic water supply shortage in the Kathmandu valley with the diversion of 170 million liters a day water from the Melamchi River through a 26-km long tunnel in its first phase.

It is the largest drinking water project in the history of the country. With the objective of supplying adequate drinking water to the residents of capital valley, the Melamchi project has been in the offing for the last one-decade.

Various donors had committed to finance the USD 464 million dollars Melamchi Water Supply Project (MWSP) including the Asian Development Bank (ADB), Japan Bank for International Cooperation (JBIC), Norwegian Agency for International Development (NORAD), Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA), Nordic Development Fund (NDF) and Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC).