When Prime Minister Chandra Shumshere was planning to setup Kathmandu´s first college in 1918, he looked for open space. The site he selected for the Tri Chandra College was among vegetable patches to the east of the Rani Pokhaii water tank, then well outside the city limits.
Today, the college sits in the middle of metropolitan Kathmandu. The quest foi land for private and public construction has taken developers further and further from the immediate outskirts of the old city. The Rana aristocracy began the trend by choosing the isolation of the more distant sites like Sanepa, Maharajganj, Jawalakhel and Min Bhawan to indulge in their penchant for sprawling European estates.
And so it has continued, with government complexes, new army barracks and private homes vying with each other in a race to ´cover´ more ground. POT all the space that Greater Kathmandu requires for its expansion, there has always been one way to get it — convert agricultural lands into urban use. Gauchar Airport usurped pasture lands traditionally under the jurisdiction of the Pashupati Nath temple. In the late 1950s, Tribhuvan University was built-on prime agricultural land below the town of Kirtipur.
By the end of the 1960s, much of the low-lying lands on either side of the Tukucha and Dhobikhola streams, and the western shores of the Bagmati and Bishnumati were converted to non-agricultural use. By the early 1970s, areas formerly considered rural were colonised Bansbari, Chabahil, Sinamangal, Teku/Kalimati, Baneswor, Bishalnagar, Samakhusi and Lagankhel.