Water and Wastewater services in Nepal with Anand Gautam, WaterAid Nepal/Godawari Municipality

[FINAL] Water and Wastewater services in Nepal with Anand Gautam, WaterAid Nepal, Godawari Municipality
[00:00:00] Piers Clark: Welcome to the Exec Exchange 15 minute podcast, in which a leader from the water sector shares a story to inspire, educate, and inform other water sector leaders from around the globe. My name is Piers Clark, and today my guest is Anand Gautam, who is here on this call representing the Godawari Municipality in Nepal.
[00:00:20] Piers Clark: Anand, wonderful to have you with us.
[00:00:23] Anand Gautam: Thank you for giving me this opportunity.
[00:00:26] Piers Clark: Now you actually work for WaterAid, but you are here on this call representing this remote community in Nepal. Let's talk a bit about your background first, can you tell me how did you end up doing this role?
[00:00:40] Anand Gautam: My name is Anand Gautam, and I serve as the  Municipal Water Operator Partnership Coordinator at WaterAid Nepal. Before joining Water Nepal, I used to work in different NGOs and community organizations. Once I have done my MSc in Interdisciplinary Water Management from Nepal Engineering College, I thought that it would be better to start work in water, sanitation, hygiene and solid waste in Nepal.
[00:01:05] Piers Clark: So Anand, you were born in Nepal and now working in Nepal to improve sanitation and water supply and wider WASH issues for your fellow residents.
[00:01:16] Piers Clark: Just help us with the geography. Where are you with regards Kathmandu? Where is the Godawari Municipality based?
[00:01:23] Anand Gautam: Godawari municipality is located at the southern part of the Kathmandu Valley. It is one of the biggest municipality in Kathmandu. 97,633 people lives in the municipality and there are 24,045 households. It has three types of settlement, the urban, peri-urban, and rural settlement in the hilly area.
[00:01:46] Anand Gautam: Out of the 14 wards in Godawari municipality. Three wards are rural settings, five wards are peri-urban setting, and six wards are in the urban setting. Around 33% of people lives in the rural part, around 33% in the urban settings, and around 33% in the peri-urban area.
[00:02:09] Piers Clark: Alright, so if I was living in one of those communities, what is my water and sanitation infrastructure and how does it differ between those three communities?
[00:02:17] Anand Gautam: In the Godawari municipality, there are three types of service provider. One is the  Kathmandu Upatyaka Khanepani Limited which is one of the biggest service utility in Nepal. This covered the 26% of populations are Godawari municipality focusing in the cities and urban area. In the remaining part, there are 63 Water and Sanitation User Committees.
[00:02:40] Anand Gautam: They provide the drinking water facility to household levels, mainly focusing in the part of rural area and some part of city area.
[00:02:50] Piers Clark: And if I was a resident in, say, the city area, what sort of water infrastructure have I got? Have I got running water? Have I got a flushing toilet? What is it I'm used to? And how does that compare if I was living in the rural part?
[00:03:04] Anand Gautam: In the rural part, people get water from community tap, and they also use the natural water source from the spring or sometimes the river. In case of the city area. Most of the households have pipeline connections and they get intermittent service of water.
[00:03:19] Anand Gautam: That means in a day they get waters some hours, but this is not the quality water. They have to treat water at household levels. They have to use other facilities like filter, chlorine and boiling of the water for the drinking purpose. They also use groundwater by making the wells and deep boring.
[00:03:40] Piers Clark: So in the rural areas, you've got community taps and you've got taking relatively clean water from the streams.
[00:03:47] Piers Clark: When it comes to the city areas, most houses have actually got a water supply, but that water supply is very intermittent. It might just be for a few hours in the day, or it might be just for a few hours in the week, and the actual quality of the water there isn't good enough. It needs some sort of household treatment.
[00:04:04] Piers Clark: And then they'll top that up with also water coming from the groundwater sources. That's the picture on the drinking water side. Now let's do the same for the wastewater assets. How do those differ?
[00:04:15] Anand Gautam: In case of the wastewater, we don't have the exact facility of the treatment of the wastewater, but the fecal sludge that is collected in the toilet are emptied from household levels by some private vendor. They carry it and then they take away from the city.
[00:04:32] Anand Gautam: In particularly one ward, there is the decentralized wastewater treatment system. We call it DEWATS. They have the facility to connect the sewerage at least to 700 households.
[00:04:46] Piers Clark: Excellent. Just to make sure that everyone's captured it. On the wastewater side, most of the people in the Godawari community have pit latrines and those pit latrines have someone coming around and manually removing the fecal sludge and taking it away from the city.
[00:05:01] Piers Clark: Now you've got a new sewage treatment plant only connected to 700 households and is treating sewage; you described it as decentralized, but compared with what you are doing, I'd say it was a sort of centralized facility.
[00:05:14] Piers Clark: I've actually got one more question on the people living in the Godawari community. Any way you can encapsulate for us what an individual would be doing?
[00:05:24] Piers Clark: What's their typical GDP for example?
[00:05:27] Anand Gautam: In the case of the urban and the most of the peri- urban area, people work in the official job and the private sector job.
[00:05:35] Anand Gautam: In the case of the rural part, there are two types of income. One is the agriculture, as well as the livestock, and most of the household's youths are in the foreign work in the Gulf country, and they send remittance back to households.
[00:05:48] Piers Clark: Excellent. That's been really useful. I wanted to take our listeners on the journey of understanding what the infrastructure is on both the water and the wastewater side and what the community is that you are dealing with. Now, let's move to talking about what you have been doing in your role to support this community.
[00:06:06] Anand Gautam: I serve as the Municipal Water Operator Partnership Coordinator at Water Nepal. I am closely supporting Godawari Municipality in the implementation of  Godawari Prabalya WASH. We have been doing eight different workflow in Godawari municipality.  The drinking water, sanitation, solid waste, integrated water management, governance, as well as the infrastructure.
[00:06:32] Piers Clark: Institutional strengthening as well. You're trying to make it so that the people that actually run the utility not only have the facilities that they need to do, but also they have the capability to deliver and look after those facilities.
[00:06:46] Anand Gautam: Yes, correct. In this partnership, we provide the technical support as well as the trainings to Godawari municipality staff as well as staff from Water and Sanitation Users Committee.
[00:06:57] Anand Gautam: Now we particularly work with the Lele Water and Sanitation Users Committee as well as some private vendor who are working to empty fecal sludge from household levels.
[00:07:08] Anand Gautam: We are also providing training to workers so that they can maintain health and their safety. In municipality levels, we are supporting to endorse water and sanitation and hygiene master plan, and as well as the other laws, policies, and the guidelines that are required to do work to ensure safely managed drinking water, sanitation, and the solid waste.
[00:07:32] Piers Clark: And how long has Water Aid in Nepal been active in the Godawari community?
[00:07:37] Anand Gautam: We have a long partnership with Godawari municipality. For this project, we have already completed three years, but in 2015 we did different works in the different community of Godawari municipality to ensure safely managed drinking water right after the earthquake in Nepal.
[00:08:00] Piers Clark: So, in this current project, you've been working with the community for three years, but actually about 10 years ago was when Water Aid Nepal first engaged with the community.
[00:08:10] Piers Clark: Now you've been involved with the Asian Development Bank's Twinning Program. Tell me a bit about how that's gone, what you've learned from it.
[00:08:18] Anand Gautam: First of all, I would like to give thanks to Asian Development Bank for this opportunity. It was one of the biggest event in my life where I met more than 70 utilities working in the Asia region. I realized that so many work in water and are be gone in the different part of Asia also. I also got opportunity to talk with utilities about our project in this platform, and I also attended this water security masterclass that was very insightful for me.
[00:08:54] Anand Gautam: I got a chance to learn about what is happening all around the world regarding the freshwater conservations.
[00:09:00] Piers Clark: It's brilliant to hear these sort of networking events where you bring together practitioners sharing different issues, but with commonality on them. You can share in a safe space the things that are working for you, the things that aren't working for you.
[00:09:11] Piers Clark: You can see what other people are doing. You can learn from their experiences. Now let's talk about the Twinning Program. Who was your utility twin?
[00:09:20] Anand Gautam: VAKIN is the mentor for us.  They serve drinking water, sanitation, as well as the solid waste management in northern part of Sweden. In Umeå municipality, the population is quite similar to the Godawari municipality.
[00:09:34] Anand Gautam: They have more than seven staff members who are closely supporting us. They provide training orientations through the virtual sessions, and we also got an opportunity to go Sweden to see what is their management practice in drinking water, sanitation, and as well as the fecal sludge.
[00:09:52] Anand Gautam: We discuss with the community. We discuss with a policymaker. We discuss with some water operators. And our staff from Godawari municipality engaged with the VAKIN team. They sit together. They work together. They learn a lot and try to apply in Godawari municipality.
[00:10:10] Piers Clark: Again, just to make sure that the audience have captured it. Your mentor was VAKIN, V-A-K-I-N, in Sweden, a very different utility and a very different part of the globe.
[00:10:19] Piers Clark: Yet as you've just described, there's enormous amounts of learning that was able to come together on how you could manage your water, how you could deal with master plans, and actually those visits both from VAKIN in Sweden coming to you and you going to them learning from what each utility is doing and bringing best practice back.
[00:10:40] Piers Clark: Now, where are you at in the mentoring program? When did things start?
[00:10:44] Anand Gautam: The program was started 2022, July, so it's been three years now.
[00:10:49] Piers Clark: Are you still maintaining contact with your friends in Sweden?
[00:10:53] Anand Gautam: Yes. We just completed one big event in Godawari municipality. There are nine members, including the CEO of VAKIN.
[00:11:02] Anand Gautam: Within the five days, we did 20 different events here. Our partnership is still running. It'll be close by end of June, and the reporting is end of the November. But we have more than project relations. We have personal relations.
[00:11:16] Anand Gautam: We met the family when we were in Sweden. They met our family where they come in Nepal. We know their family, they know our family. It is beyond the project relations.
[00:11:26] Piers Clark: It is absolutely wonderful to hear, isn't it? Five days with 20 events, so this was a hard work period. Yet over that you are building friendships that extend beyond just the commercials, and that's how you build real friendships that will see you through the tough times.
[00:11:41] Piers Clark: Anand, we are coming to the end of our time. I'd like you to indulge me. If you could go back 20 years and give advice to a young Anand, what would you be telling?
[00:11:51] Anand Gautam: Now I realized that many spring source of Nepal are drying day by day. In the Terai regions, we lost the groundwater and people are suffering even to get the drinking water. At the same time, our river are polluted.
[00:12:06] Anand Gautam: If we started this work 20 years ago, I think the water source would be protected and conserved better than now. So I will request to the Ministry of Education in Nepal to include conservation and protecting water resources course in primary, secondary level, not only for the Bachelor in engineering levels.
[00:12:28] Piers Clark: That is a brilliant answer. If you could go back 20 years, you'd be spotting the environmental and hygiene crisis that was coming and you'd have implemented things sooner.
[00:12:39] Piers Clark: You have been listening to the Exec Exchange with me, Piers Clark, and my guest today has been Anand Gautam from Water Aid Nepal, and we've been talking about water and sanitation in the Godawari community in Nepal.
[00:12:54] Piers Clark: I hope you can join us next time. Thank you.