Kathmandu, Jan. 11: Come June, and the Bagmati River flowing through the sacred Pashupatinath temple will become a clean place to take a dip in its holy water in peace.
By the end of the current fiscal year, the first two phases of the 25-year-long master plan to make the Bagmati clean and environment-friendly will be over. Nearly 70 per cent of the work under the Bagmati Area Sewerage Construction/Rehabilitation Project (BASCRP) has so far been completed.
“The remaining task will be completed by Jun. By then our most ambitious plan of channelling clean water through the Pashupati area will become a success story,” says president of the Project, Bidur Poudel.
If all goes well, over the next two decades, the river that flows through the Kathmandu Valley will also undergo a facelift. Under the first two phases of the Project, the section from Gokarna to Aryaghat of Pashupatinath is being cleaned up. For this, the Project has come up with the entire necessary infrastructure.
“However, there is still a lot of works to be done,” Poudel told Prime Minister Girija Prasad Koirala during an inspection visit of the site today.
According to member secretary of the BASCRP, Shree Ram Deep Shah, wastewater produced by some 200,000 people residing in the northeastern side of the valley and some 70 industries there, will be treated through aerobic and anaerobic processes and brought to a collection chamber. The water will then be filtered in the grit chamber and channelled through an oxidation ditch.
Only then will the purified water be allowed to join the river, while the waste water will pass off through the tunnel. The waste generated in the grit chamber will be dried and turned into fertiliser for use in farming.
For this, a 12-km sewerage from Gokarna to Guheshwori has been constructed to divert waste water from the river to filter it. An underground tunnel, 435 m. in length, from Tamraganga to Tilganga has also been built to channel the wastewater.
The project has also constructed a drainage-decontaminating centre at Tamraganga, near Guheshwori, and a sewage treatment plant at Tamraganga. On either side of the river, a 12-m wide green belt is being planned. Since people’s participation is the key to the programme’s success, creating awareness among them is one of the aspects of the programme.
The tunnelling portion of the project is being taken up by a Chinese contractor, China Shandong International Economic and Technical Co-operation Corporation, while a joint team of Nepali and Japanese technicians are looking after the other aspects of the construction works.
Under the next two phases of the master plan, the Project intends to construct a drainage system all the way from Tilganga to Chovar that will also have a green belt on either side of the River. It also plans to construct six treatment plants at different junctions adjoining the Bagmati River to produce compost fertiliser.
But as it strives to move ahead, the Rs. 540 million Project is facing a lot of problems. The biggest problem is that the Bagmati River has been heavily encroached on either side, making it difficult to build a green belt. “The government should also think seriously about the carpet factories whose chemically treated water harm the equipment installed in the processors,” says Poudel.
Talking to The Rising Nepal, he said that the government has also not built the Bagmati link road along the river that was promised at the time when the project was being initiated.