New Government, Same Old Problems In Water Sector

• Saroj Karki
• Suchana Acharya

Background

Water has historically shaped Nepal’s agriculture, energy, food security, livelihoods, disaster resilience, and long-term economic stability. Over the past few decades, Nepal has made reasonable progress in the water sector. Hydropower development has expanded, irrigated areas have grown, access to drinking water increased, flood control infrastructure has been built, water and hydro-meteorological monitoring has gradually improved, demonstrating that water, when utilized well, can be a powerful driver of national prosperity. However, the gap between Nepal’s immense water potential and the public benefits it actually delivers remains far too wide. The problem is no longer the complete absence of policy, plan, effort, or ambition. It is the persistent weakness of governance: fragmented institutions, isolated planning, poor coordination, weak implementation, limited use of technology, inadequate technical capacity, and a habit of announcing big goals without measuring real results.

Nepal is still lagging in several areas that now define effective water governance worldwide: technological advancement, digital transformation, evidence-based planning, institutional coordination, and the technical strengthening of water professionals. Too often, goals are announced without serious attention to implementation capacity, performance measurement, or accountability. A scientific and practical performance assessment mechanism is also lacking in the water sector, making policy and progress evaluation difficult. A new government must undertake an honest reckoning with the legal, institutional, technical, and policy weaknesses that have long constrained the optimal, equitable, and strategic development of the water resources sector. A functioning water governance system capable of turning promise into performance is the urgent need of the hour.

Existing Policies and Implementation

Much of Nepal’s water sector still rests on relatively old legal foundations. The Water Resources Act, 1992 and the Water Resources Regulation, 1993 were important in their time. They recognized collective use of water and gave legal standing to user groups. But they were designed for a different Nepal, before federalism, before today’s climate risks, and before current demands for integrated basin management, digital systems, groundwater regulation, and intergovernmental coordination. In the meantime, the new Water Resources Bill failed to secure approval during the last parliamentary term. Groundwater governance remains even weaker, despite its growing importance across the Tarai.

Nepal’s deeper failure is not policy absence but policy neglect. The country has produced no shortage of strategies, master plans, and frameworks. The Koshi River Water Resources Development Master Plan, 1985, formulated by JICA, was never strategically implemented. The Irrigation Master Plan, 1990 delivered only part of what it promised. The valuable Water Resources Strategy, 2002 and National Water Plan, 2005 were meant to guide investment, institutions, and environmental management. Yet their outcomes were never seriously measured, and Maoist insurgency, federal restructuring further disrupted continuity.

That is why the National Water Resources Policy, 2020 and the Irrigation Policy, 2024 must be treated with caution as well as hope. Both contain important ideas: integrated water resources management, river-basin planning, multi-purpose use, digitalization, groundwater use, climate resilience, and stronger coordination across federal, provincial, and local governments. But implementation arrangements aligned with these policies should be put in place to overcome past failures and achieve the targets.

The same realism must apply to irrigation. Irrigation Master Plan, 2024 appears, in many respects, to have drifted away from practical realities and from the core concerns of irrigation development. Nepal has spent decades treating irrigation as a construction agenda rather than a development and management outcome. Barrages, canals, intakes, tube wells, embankments, and structures are counted; agricultural transformation is assumed. But where is the serious evidence that irrigation investments are consistently translating into higher productivity, improved cropping intensity, better market linkage, and stronger farmer livelihoods? Expansion without performance is not progress. Irrigation cannot be judged only by kilometers of canals built or budgets spent. It must be judged by water delivery, service reliability, farm output, and economic return.

Institutionally, federal, provincial, and local governments all hold parts of the sector, but this has often led to overlap, duplication, delay, and weak accountability. At the same time, there is a growing shortage of experienced technical personnel to plan, implement, and manage water resources projects, a problem partly worsened by civil service restructuring under federalism. This remains one of post-federal Nepal’s most serious challenges.

Existing Water Challenges

In the Water sector, overlaps between federal and provincial institutions have surfaced in recent times; provinces often lack full authority, capacity, or fiscal space; local governments remain the weakest tier in technical management of sources, recharge zones, and small-scale systems. Water does not flow according to bureaucratic rivalry. A holistic approach to planning is essential, and its absence is visible across the country. In the Tarai, one season brings drought, another inundation. Groundwater extraction is expanding, yet aquifers remain poorly studied, weakly monitored, and barely regulated. Recharge is discussed more often than it is institutionalized. Poor drainage, settlement encroachment, and weak cross-border coordination continue to worsen flood impacts across all geography. A country that increasingly depends on groundwater still lacks a serious culture of groundwater accounting.

Nepal’s rivers are also under growing pressure. Uncontrolled extraction of sand and gravel is destabilizing riverbeds and banks, damaging ecology, threatening irrigation structures, and increasing risk to settlements and bridges. They are symptoms of a state that has failed to govern its river systems with discipline. Hydropower, often celebrated as a national success story, also needs harder scrutiny. Nepal has relied too heavily on run-of-river projects, despite their dry-season limitations. Storage and reservoir-based projects, where feasible, deserve far more strategic attention for electricity generation, irrigation support, flood moderation, and dry-season regulation. At the same time, floods, landslides, and sediment surges are increasingly threatening hydropower infrastructure itself and overall energy security.

Another chronic weakness is the erosion of technical institutions. Water governance requires competent engineers, hydrologists, planners, environmental specialists, and data professionals working under stable mandates. Yet technical institutions have gradually lost morale, continuity, and authority due to unnecessary political interventions. Without restoring professional capacity and institutional dignity, reform will remain cosmetic.

Nepal’s water-sector digitalization and data governance remain at a very early stage, receiving far too little priority and investment. No country can manage irrigation, groundwater, flood risk, hydropower, and river basins through scattered files, incomplete records, and unreliable databases. Real-time monitoring, integrated information systems, asset registries, groundwater observation, and evidence-based planning are no longer optional. Research culture in water sector has gained momentum, but its focus has increasingly drifted away from ground realities and the practical needs of implementation.

At the local scale, the neglect of springs, ponds, wetlands, headwaters, recharge areas, and traditional source systems is equally shortsighted. They are the foundation of drinking water, local irrigation, ecosystem health, and climate resilience. Nepal’s water diplomacy also needs to mature. On Transboundary Rivers, treaties (eg. Mahakali treaty and Pancheswar project), barrages, and inundation issues, the country has too often acted reactively rather than strategically. Technical preparation, national clarity, and continuity of position must come before a crisis, not after it.

Tackling Water Challenges

What, then, should be the new government’s priority? First, it should conduct a serious audit of the water sector-laws, policies, institutions, investments, and outcomes. Before drafting new plans, Nepal must ask which past targets were realistic, which were ignored, which were outdated, and which institutions have become bottlenecks rather than enablers.

Second, the government must update the legal architecture and expedite a federal water law that reflects constitutional realities, basin planning, groundwater governance, climate risk, and practical intergovernmental coordination. Third, it must clarify roles among federal, provincial, and local governments: who plans, who builds, who operates, who finances, who maintains, and who is answerable when systems fail.

Fourth, the government must shift from project politics to system planning, which is limited to policy documents to date. Irrigation should be linked to source sustainability, command-area performance, crop choices, farmer demand, and maintenance feasibility. Flood management should be tied to hydrology, watershed conditions, settlement planning, and drainage. Fifth, experts and energetic young professionals must be fused into decision-making. Water is too strategic and too technically complex to be guided mainly by patronage or political convenience.

Sixth, monitoring and evaluation must become a mandatory provision with a strong architecture for performance measurements. Policies, master plans, and flagship projects should be regularly assessed against measurable indicators: service reliability, actual irrigated area, asset functionality, disaster resilience, maintenance adequacy, environmental performance, and farmer satisfaction. Research and pilot initiatives in water resources planning must be given high priority to address persistent performance failures and improve implementation outcomes.

Nepal already has a strong platform to accelerate water resources development, but the new government must do more than issue instructions; it must equip professionals with the resources, skills, institutional support, and enabling legal framework needed to implement plans and projects effectively and deliver measurable results. The new government should understand a simple truth: Nepal’s water crisis is not merely technical. It is political, institutional, and managerial. The country does not suffer from a lack of water alone; it suffers from a lack of discipline in governing water. Unless that changes, new promises will produce old disappointments. But if the government is willing to confront legal obsolescence, institutional confusion, weak accountability, and implementation failure, the water sector can still become a foundation of national stability and growth rather than another monument to missed opportunity.

Karki and Acharya are professionals engaged in Nepal’s irrigation and water resources sector