Remembering ‘Kamred’ Bihari

We called each other ‘Kamred’ although neither of us were anything close to being communists. 

If I phoned him and he was not around, I would ask that he be just told “Kamred had called”, and I would get a call back from Bihari Krishna Shrestha as soon as he got home.

It all started way back in 1986. The World Bank had spent more than a decade with three water supply projects in a dozen Nepali cities including Kathmandu, and was poised to launch the Fourth which was to be the notorious Melamchi water supply project for Kathmandu Valley. 

But the Bank’s major conditionality was that His Majesty’s Government of Nepal massively raise its water tariff.

Prime Minister Marich Man Singh was in a fix: not only was any such increase hugely unpopular but in this case none of the three projects had delivered what they had promised, which was improved 24-hour water supply in all the major Nepali cities as well as effective wastewater and sewerage disposal. 

So, he did what politicians conveniently do: formed a commission then known popularly as the “Pokhrel Commission”. It was chaired by former chief engineer and member of the Rashtriya Panchayat Birendra Kesari Pokhrel with joint-secretary of the National Planning Commission Bihariji (who had also worked with the Royal Palace’s corruption investigation outfit, the Jaanch Bujh Bibhag) and me.

Apparently, we took our task a bit too seriously, starting bottom-up calling a formal meeting of all municipalities with Bihariji going west all the way to Nepalgunj, and me east up to Dharan.

Following that, we summoned all the donor and Nepali officials to testify before us and explain what we had seen. Our primary conclusions were that, with Kathmandu’s leakage and theft of drinking water standing at an average of 70%, Melamchi was premature. 

We recommended putting efforts instead on plugging those holes, dismantling the centralised water supply office at Tripureshwar and handing over water supply management to the municipalities themselves.

The central authorities did not like our findings, and refused to decentralise the management of water supply: they accused us of ‘going beyond our brief’.

The World Bank too spent the next eight years trying to suppress our report, ultimately withdrawing from Melamchi and the urban water supply sector altogether.

 In a classic case of not ‘donor harmonization’ but ‘donor competition’, the Asian Development Bank then jumped in to take up Melamchi, with the sad results we see today.

It was during tea breaks and khaja time at the tense Pokhrel Commission investigation hearings that I would regale them with my collection of anti-Soviet Russian jokes. That is what led Bihariji to start calling me ‘Kamred’, and vice versa.

In 1989 at the height of the Indian blockade, when I had left my government job and become and independent consultant/researcher, I got a call from Bihariji who was then secretary of housing and physical planning responsible for water supply. 

The Germans had completed their Dhulikhel water supply project and were planning to hand it over to the central office at Tripureswar. Knowing its decrepit state, Bihariji was not willing to go that route.

Being Nepal’s first ethnographer and fully conversant with the capacity of local groups to work wonders, he asked me if I could do an evaluation of its local institutional capacity and to find out if they could manage such a system if handed over to them. 

His early ethnographic work in Jumla’s irrigation system, which showed how Jumlis grew rice where rice cannot normally be grown at altitudes of 2,600m using a complex nexus of social and agricultural practices, was telling him it was possible.

I stayed in Dhulikhel for weeks, even as anti-Panchayat agitations were roiling the country, and found out that Nepal’s sharpest traders, the creative Dhulikhel sahujis led by their redoubtable mayor Bel Prasad Shrestha, were more than capable and willing to run the water system by themselves. 

Against much establishment opposition, it was handed over to them, and today Dhulikhel is one the best municipality-run water utility in Nepal.

We were neighbours in Patan and stayed in touch, dropping over for guff-gaff. Our last professional work together was his agreeing to write a chapter for a book I was editing and which was published by Routledge London in 2017. 

It was on the success of the small farmers’ cooperative movement since the 1980s, as well as its subsequent decline due to allegedly democratic but unresponsive government as well as self-centered foreign donors. 

A few months back, I had dropped by his Chakupat home to convince him to talk to a group of activists from all the three valley cities on the value of, and the means to protect, traditional guthis. 

He agreed and had enthusiastically started preparing for it, but it had to be postponed as he suffered a bout of mild pneumonia. It was re-scheduled for next month. Alas, it was not to be.

Adieu, Kamred! You will live on as a role model and an inspiration for upcoming generations of Nepali social scientists.

Dipak Gyawali is a hydropower energy, and political economist and academic with Nepal Academy of Science and Technology (NAST). He is a former minister of water resources.