Except perhaps some centuries ago, when town planners under the Mallas still had their say, the three urban centres of Kathmandu Valley have always been dirty. Stagnant sewers, mounds of solid wastes, open-air latrines and drinking water swarming with bacteria have always been a part of the Kathmandu, Patan and Bhaktapur ecosystem.
While things have been slowly worsening further since the turn of the century, during the past decade the Valley has slipped into an environmental tail-spin. The situation has become desperate as air, water, solid-wastes, and even air pollution choke the three town cores as well as the urban sprawl neighbourhoods. This deterioration has been fueled by the Valley-centric development of the country, a near-total absence of planned expansion, a tripling in the number of poorly-maintained motor vehicles, the only cement factory in the world located four kilometres from a city center, a micro-climate that tends to retain atmospheric pollutants, the lack of pollution standards, and a largely pliant academic and journalistic community that does not demand enough.
Surprisingly, there have been no official studies commissioned to check how bad the quality of environmental life actually become for the hundred of thousands of Valley residents. Neither the Department of Meteorology nor Tribhuvan University keeps a simple device that can measure air quality and there are not even facilities for rudimentary samplings of effluents and ambient air and water. In 1983, officials at the Royal Drugs Research Laboratory even refused to test the water from the Dhobi Khola rivulet for fear that their equipment would be damaged by the heavily polluted samples.
While funded studies are lacking, however, there is no dearth of professionals: doctors, scientists and others who are concerned and have kept track of the decline. Even lay observers have noticed that there is more haze over Kathmandu every year. "What can you say of a situation where fecal matter comes out of water taps, as it did in Samakushi (a Kathmandu neighbourhood)?" asks Dr, Damodar Upadhaya, Chief of the Health Ministry's Epidemiology Divisions. According to Upendra Man Malla, the member of the newly reconstituted National Planning Commission responsible for environment and coriservation matters, when he goes up Nagarkot hill these days and looks down at the brown blanket of smog over the capital city, he feels, "kay bhayeko jasto lagchha (what has happened)!"