CONTENTS
LIST OF ACRONYMS /CHAPTER 1
Introduction
/ 1CHAPTER 2
Engagement with Modern Technology
/ 4CHAPTER 3
Modern Education in Nepal
/ 7CHAPTER 4
Insights and Lessons
/ 13CHAPTER 5
Reconceptualisng Water Education
/ 18CHAPTER 6
A New Curriculam for Water Education
/ 20CHAPTER 7
Construction Engagement
/ 23NOTES
/ 25REFERENCES
/ 27ANNEX 1
/ 30ANNEX 2
/ 77CHAPTER – 1
INTRODUCTION
From the Himalayas to the Ganga plains, and from the Aravalis to the hard-rock region of South India, water resources in South Asia are currently facing the stress of change. The result is not only that water is degraded, but that the sustenance base and livelihood of communities are threatened. Despite the heavy investments made in water resource development in the past problems like depleted groundwater, polluted water sources, poor access to drinking water, unreliable irrigation, and lack of access to energy are pervasive. Many groups -- local, regional, national and international -- are working on various issues related to water management. At the local level, regional and national levels, the focus is project implementation. The issues at the international levels are related to advocacy, inter-state and international relations, and understanding the dynamics of ongoing changes within which water features is a key element. These groups are very poorly linked conceptually, and their scope is highly fragmented. In addition, the entrenched disputes are rife.
Rivers in South Asia are simultaneously a boon and a bane. Water sources are the basis of sustenance and community livelihood, but in the monsoon, for example, the rivers overflowing their banks lead to disasters, which disproportionately affect the poor families. The fast pace of change, the region is experiencing has lead to a new type of stresses as governments are unable to provide even the basic level of services. Large numbers of rural people migrate to urban regions where the condition is not different, as pollution of groundwater and rivers is widespread. It is against this backdrop, where the inherent capabilities of both the natural and social systems are highly variable, the development needs and aspirations of the people have to be defined and managed. Nowhere is this challenge more complex than in Nepal.
Like the geological and atmospheric processes that have gouged Nepal’s landscape and given it its unique topographical features, a mix of historical encounters has shaped the country’s human mosaic. In the short horizontal distance of a few kilometres, the climate changes from tropical to subtropical and on to temperate and alpine and even arctic. Matching this diversity are the people and communities who live in the different ecological niches. Along a typical river valley of Nepal are found villages with different ethnic compositions and languages. Each element of the mosaic has its own aspirations for the future and perception of security needs. The challenges is succinctly encapsulated by Gyawali (2002):
“In this flux, the basic social unit, which has withstood the stress of change is the family with its larger clan: almost all interactions of individuals revolve around this unit and its collective decisions. The nation-state is a much younger institution that does not quite command the same uniform loyalty as clan based intermediary institution. The market is even younger institution than the state: but because it often caters to the comfort of the family better than the does a rapacious, rent-seeking government is preferred. In this milieu, the nature of homogenising technology militates against the nature of diversified society.” The author argues that large-scale water development approach promoted by the centralised state will demand more homogeneity and allegiance to the state from its people. In its current top down approach unfortunately, the state does not meet the individual and community aspiration of security for the future.
In Nepal, the first interventions for water development technology were undertaken brought by fuedal rulers and since then promoted by single-mission bureaucracies such as the Irrigation Department or the Water Resources Ministry. These agencies are an offshoot of the water development model of colonial India in the nineteenth century and western United States in the early twentieth century and as such are hardware-oriented and centralised. Such an approach assumes that people every where are the same, behave in only one style and have uniform needs.
At the heart of this approach is a single, often unquestioned, set of assumption about human needs and wants: the rational utility-maximising individual. This leads to two important and widely relied upon principles espoused by the paradigm. The top down is the only approach applicable and that micro level can be handled by the concept of per-capita (or per individual). This therefore implies that totality is the aggregation of the homogenised micro-level responses and vice versa.[i] Past experience suggests that such concepts do not capture the diversity as far as access to water and the services it provides are concerned.
Worse, hierarchical, technologically oriented organisations have in-built institutional mechanisms that filter out the primary concern of good science — conceived as the quest for truth. Water resource development has put the technological tools first, rather than the people first. Consequently, such hardware-guided approach relegates the social and environmental concerns to "externalised costs". In the face of this reactive encounter with modernisation, Nepal’s social systems are undergoing rapid transmutation and experiencing high level of stress as the state continues to fail as an institutional resource. One indication of the failure of the approach is the Maoist insurgency and the recent clamping on of a state of emergency in the wake of violent insurrection.
Why the plural polity that came into being after 1990 is unable to provide political vent to the sense of dissatisfaction in Nepal is a question that needs much deeper analysis than is possible here. Yet, surely one strand of the complexly interwoven explanation is related to the inability of most political parties and the government they represent to conceive accurately the complexity of water development. At the very least, in conceiving water development, the nature of heterogeneous mosaic is not recognised to make the more inclusive state than in the past by building intermediaries. Thus the concerns of equity, social justice and inclusiveness central to the aspirations of the country’s social mosaic are not fostered beyond rhetoric. Almost all-political parties, irrespective of their ideological leaning, assumed and continue to believe that water development (read “electricity development”) would be achieved using a hierarchical model. Politicians naively expect that this objective would be achieved by first building a large-scale water project and then exporting the generated power to earn revenue for the government.[ii] Such simplistic thinking has failed to realise that technological tools come with their social carriers. That unleashing a new technology in a socio-system as unprepared as is present-day Nepal, results in prosperity for its carriers but marginalises the unprepared. The proponents of the hierarchic mode trapped into technological entrenchment gradually face de-legitimisation on the political front as they fail to deliver even the most basic of services. Thus, what is perceived as a mere technological change has profound social and political implications.
The hierarchical paradigm of water development not only reflects how bureaucratic the Nepali government is, but it has also shaped the nature of country’s engineering education. The educational approach is, in fact, guided by events in colonial India. Both water development strategies and education practices reflect the colonial legacy on a country that was never under direct colonial rule. Each approach sustains the other: the knowledge stream that the education system produces finds entry into the technological model, while its outcomes finds easy entry into the educational process. Instead of playing a key role in the processes of enquiry and contestation, educational institutions perpetuate the status quo, and this produce graduates unresponsive to the complex needs of social and natural heterogeneity. Understanding the emerging challenges for the development and management of water requires continuous research into and exploration of a complex and inter-linked system consisting of diverse natural, social, cultural and political constituents. Understanding this is a prerequisite for achieving better distributive justice for the impoverished and the asset poor in terms of access to water, and the services it provides at the family level.[iii]
Five decades of planned development, executed largely within the rubric of foreign aid, and designing with water as a key resource to achieving development, has brought few changes. Despite the heavy influx of resources and technology, the country is unable to cope with the challenges of self-governance. This struggle is due to the nation's inability to conceptualise development objectives in consonance with the social and physical contexts. Instead, it tends to replicate political and technological ideology from Europe. The fault among others, lies in the absence of a scientific and technological culture, which were not inculcated because of Nepal’s deeply entrenched rigid social structure that did not allow any light of reform.[iv] Water education is deeply embedded within this structural straightjacket and unable to respond to the actual needs of the society.
This study attempts to assess higher education in Nepal with a specific focus on water education in the technical sector. An analysis of the evolution of the modern education is accomplished using social historical perspective. The study is undertaken under the purview of criteria set by SACI water for the review of water education in South Asian countries. The goals of SACI water’s collaborative efforts include assessments of the education programs, and their disciplinary orientation and scope of curricula; quality of teaching, types of jobs that graduates in water resource education have gone into over the last decade, the need and demand for integrated and interdisciplinary skills in water resource management; and government policies on water resource development.
The study offers a qualitative analysis of the evolution of the water education sector. The report presents an analysis of the current status of Nepal's water education programmes with respect to their adequacy in responding to the water-related problems. It also presents suggestions and recommendations for facilitating changes in the higher education system in the field of water resource development. The paper first provides the historical context of the entry of modern technology into Nepal. The next section provides an overview of Nepal's education policy, particularly after the political changes of 1950. A summary of the review of water-related education in the country is the discussed next. Finally, a way forward in response to the policy issues related to water education is presented.
The paper is primarily based on a review of the available curricula and syllabi, which include the Bachelor's and Master's degree programs from Nepal's four universities, namely, Tribhuvan, Kathmandu, Pokhara and Eastern. Topics related to water, water science, water management and its applications, and the number of credits allocated to have been identified and tabulated in Annex 2. Discussions with experts and notable persons engaged in various professional disciplines are another major sources. In addition, several students, mostly of engineering disciplines, were interviewed to identity their views, expectations and experiences. Leading people from various agencies engaged in water management, water education and water projects at the government, university and private levels were interviewed for their perspectives on the status of water education and its effectiveness in modern Nepal. A list of the interviewees is included in Annex 3.
CHAPTER - 2
ENGAGEMENT WITH MODERN TECHNOLOGY
Nepal did not lag behind other South Asian countries in introducing European technology. Modern technology for water use and development was introduced in Nepal in the late 1880's in the form of a water supply system whose construction was supervised by a British engineer. In 1848, the Rana prime minister Jang Bahadur had brought a water pump from England, but it was not used because no local hand to operate the system could be found and no foreigner could be employed for the purpose (Landon, 1993). The next system built in 1911 was the 500-kW Pharping hydropower plant. Both the hydropower and water supply systems were meant to serve the palaces of Ranas. In 1920, two British engineers working in United Province were invited to build the country's first hierarchical irrigation system in the Trijuga River.[v] The system, which irrigated lands in Saptari District of East Nepal, was completed in 1928. Its approach shaped both the technology and organisational character of the country's irrigation development as it came with the institutional baggage of the North Ganga Irrigation model. The fact that farmer-built and-managed systems already dotted the country's landscape and provided irrigation to the bulk of the area was an intellectual blind spot.
The irrigation system built in eastern Nepal was a response to the commercialisation of agriculture in parts of North India and to the opening of a market for cash crops. The system was built primarily to irrigate land, and thus augment the production of birta land (land grants), although very little benefit percolated to the grass roots.[vi] In 1927, a railroad was built to connect Raxaul with Amalekhjung. Earlier a ropeway had been built to link Kathmandu with Hetauda. Another small ropeway linked Matatirtha in Kathmandu with the city centre. These transportation systems were employed to ferry materials for the construction of Rana palaces. British engineers in Calcutta were invited to design, install and supervise the construction of both ropeways.
The pursuit of ostentation and consumption rather than the enhancement of the production function of society guided the Ranas who were the original social carriers of technology in Nepal. As a result, the Western notion of science and knowledge prevailed and tended to marginalise indigenous knowledge systems. In addition, no effort was made to create the necessary social carriers for successfully operating the new technology. The assumption on the part of the Ranas, which continues even today, was that the social and institutional capacity for adapting or adopting the imported technology existed within. This, however, was not true. As a result, despite the arrival of western technology the requisite social capacity for using it effectively was not created. Furthermore, the country remained totally isolated from the cross-fertilization of ideas and the knowledge gathering, which prevailed during the industrial changes in Europe.