Can Valley await ‘multipurpose’ Melamchi?

Can Valley await ‘multipurpose’ Melamchi?
ArthaExpress.com, 4-Jan-08

The Melamchi Water Supply Project, which entered construction in 2001 with a completion target of 2006, is now expected to be completed in December 2012. The delay is hardly surprising.

Apart from facing repeated obstructions by Maoists during the insurgency, the project became a means for the king to settle political scores after his Feb 1, 2005 takeover. The project also became a means for donors to express their reservations over the king´s regime, through funding pullouts. And last year, the project was on the verge of collapse owing to ideological differences between the minister for physical planning and works and the project´s chief donor.

Now project officials have a new worry: Melamchi ´Multipurpose´ Project. Officials say the proposal to expand the Melamchi project through the incorporation of hydropower and irrigation components is an unnecessary distraction.

The proposal to expand Melamchi into a ´Multipurpose Project´ has been floated mainly by energy economist Ratna Sansar Shrestha. The proposal is not bad per se.

Shrestha has proposed that apart from the Melamchi River, water from Larke, Yangri and Balepi Rivers should also be channeled into the diversion tunnel that is to be built to pump water from Sindhupalchowk district to Sundarijal in Kathmandu.

Shrestha has reasoned that this would increase the volume of water reaching Kathmandu from the proposed 170 million liters daily to 1.2 billion liters daily. This volume would enable the building of two hydropower project - a 35-megawatt project downstream of the three rivers´ convergence with the Melamchi and a 190-megawatt project on the lower Bagmati.

Shrestha has proposed that the surplus water, once evacuated into the Bagmati, would clean that heavily polluted river and also irrigate 13,000 hectares of land in Rautahat and Sarlahi districts.

"This would ease the power crisis facing the country, and increase agricultural output in the tarai," Shrestha said.

Melamchi project officials and those watching the project closely say the expansion proposal threatens to delay progress on Melamchi, something that the Valley can ill afford.

"The idea of adding hydropower and irrigation components to Melamchi is an old one," said a key project official who preferred anonymity. "What is worrying is that people have been lobbying strongly for the expansion at a time when the design supervision consultancy for the tunnel, a major component of the project, is about to be awarded."

Norway´s NORPLAN and Finland´s JakkoPoyry are bidders for the approximately US $ 15 million consultancy. The Finnish company is certain to land it, project sources said.

"With lobbying for the project expansion gaining in strength, award of the consultancy to JakkoPoyry has come under threat," said one project source.

According to Geologist Dr Toran Sharma, who did the Environment Impact Assessment for the Melamchi project in 2001, there is no detailed study backing Shrestha´s proposal.

"Shrestha´s proposal is unclear on issues of social and downstream impacts as well as cost sharing," Sharma said. "The hydropower and irrigation projects are not a bad idea. But they can be developed as separate projects, and not as part of the Melamchi project. Melamchi in its current design and size does not hinder the development of hydropower and irrigation systems."

According to Sharma, deciding to expand the project at this point would mean a change in the project design. "This would delay the project as a new study would have to be conducted and the consultancy award process would need to be restarted," he said.