The Melamchi flood is a lesson for riverside development projects in Nepal

On June 15, a flood inundated the under-construction dam and water treatment plant of the Melamchi Water Supply Project. The details of damage in the headwork area are yet to be estimated.

The 31-billion-rupee Melamchi project took more than two decades to start distributing water in Kathmandu. But, the flood has now pushed back this project’s development. According to the project chief Ram Kumar Shrestha, no one had imagined there would be a flood of this scale. “It’s an unimaginable disaster,” he says.