A car rushes to the middle of a bridge and stops. Opening the window of the car, a big plastic bag is thrown into the semi-liquid, black shimmering river. After a while, a garbage rickshaw comes through the same way and dumps a heavy load of garbage into the same river. Near the heap of garbage, there is a large drainage pipeline depositing its waste into the river.  Just a few metres downstream, people are washing clothes; children are enjoying swimming; and farmers are washing their vegetables before supplying them to the market.

As I pass by the stinking river near my house, I see a similar scene everyday. How many of us are used to such scenes? Most Kathmandu dwellers, I believe, are quite familiar with the pathetic condition of our river.

Kathmandu is a city with a burgeoning population of about 1.7 million. Along with unplanned urbanisation, Kathmandu is suffering from an unplanned waste management system. As the country’s capital, Kathmandu can proudly boast of abundant highly educated denizens not commonly found in other cities in Nepal. But although they are educated and powerful, their scope is often too narrow.

Many organisations celebrated ‘World Water Day’ on March 22 with the slogan ‘Clean Water for a Healthy World’, stretching it to a week-long celebration with the main objective of raising the awareness of the public. Some organised week-long workshops, some cleaned the rivers, and others went for creative events. Although these programmes have been annually organised for years now, we have yet to see much progress in the health of our rivers. Instead, day-by-day, rivers are getting more polluted, thereby contributing to the increasing health hazards caused by waterborne diseases and the use of dirty river-water — where clothes are cleaned, children are bathed and vegetables are washed.

In some places, collection and management of garbage is done by municipality. But most of the time, people are still compelled to use the river to dump their garbage due to the frequent conflicts between the people of Sisdol (the dumping site) and the municipality, between the municipal workers and the municipality, and, of course, due to sudden bandhs.

It is unfortunate that no one seems to be serious in their approach to search for sustainable and practical solutions to this problem. The major cause of the problem — the government’s indifference to find long term solutions and the narrow attitude of people who have a habit of playing the blame game with the government — is ignored. Hence, let us celebrate the ‘World Water Days’ in coming years by finding a sustainable solution to the problem and strictly implementing them rather than just organising ritual events.