Wake up and stop high treason against Nepal and the Nepalis

Yours truly will try to be as objective -- and dispassionate -- as possible on a very very passionate issue between Nepal and India. 

Most probably, you have guessed it already. 

Indeed, yours truly is talking about India's plans to build high dams on Nepali territories, including the roughly 300-metre Koshi dam, to protect its territories from disasters during the rainy season and utilise waters accumulated on the laps of our hills during the rainy season for irrigation, navigation, power generation and for inter-basin transfer of water from water-surplus regions to water-deficit regions. At home, subservient political leadership has been on hard-sale for quite sometime, trying all sorts of tricks to create a support base for such projects among the public largely opposed to them after bearing for decades the disastrous consequences of the Koshi, Gandak and Mahakali treaties, by promising to operate vessels on these river systems once these mega structures come into being, thereby connecting Nepal with the high seas! Do our governments not know that water is the most precious of resources, especially in this day and age of global warming, melting Himalayas, retreating glaciers and erratic rainfall patterns? Do they not know that while there's relative abundance of sources of energy on the Planet, there's a huge scarcity of sources of water required for drinking and irrigation? Yours truly thinks successive governments, including this one, are pretending ignorance to fulfill vested interests of a neighbouring country at the expense of their own country and peoples.         

In fact, at the heart of all these 'lofty' projects is India's desire to localise the disastrous impact of the monsoon in Nepal and reap all the benefits of regulated water. This design is indeed behind the construction of the Koshi Barrage, the Tanakpur Barrage, the Gandak Canal, Laxmanpur Barrage, Rasiawal-Khurdalotan Dam and many other water regulatory structures, including high-elevation roads, on Nepali territories or close to the border in blatant violation of international practices and principle of good neighbourliness. 

If high dam projects indeed materialise, of course with tremendous pressure from India, our country, located on a highly seismic zone dotted with landslide-prone mountains and increasingly flood-prone planes, will have to bear with disastrous consequences like high dam bursts and incalculable ecological losses. Located far from these infra, the impact of disasters on bordering Indian territories will not be as severe while they will also benefit from emergence of new water-fed ecologies in arid or semi-arid areas. 

Because of these superstructures, the prevailing water crisis in the Hills, where schoolchildren trek for hours to fetch a pale of water and where migration resulting from water crises is all too common, will only deepen further, while Nepal's plains will struggle for every precious drop as a water-starved India will surely scheme to channelise all waters from our land. 

If our southern neighbour indeed manages to build these dams, that action will be akin to planting ticking bombs on Nepal's head. The world's largest democracy will indeed be able to get away with this dastardly environmental crime this time also, but generations and generations and generations of Nepalis will suffer and curse us for the crime in which we were complicit.

Therefore, at a time when talks of cross-border waterways are getting louder and louder, the onus is on all of us to prevent political and bureaucratic leadership from committing yet another act of high treason, something which so-called great leaders committed through Koshi, Gandak and Mahakali treaties and got away with.
To begin with, how about branding all these 'greats', who sold Nepal and the Nepalis down the river through these murky deals, traitors? 

Text: Devendra Gautam