A Continued Disaster

Political instability and paucity of funds delay Nepal's attempts to spring back from the 2015 earthquakes.

- ​​​​​​Shreeshan Venkatesh

THIRTY-TWO-year-old Mailee Tha-mang is eight months pregnant and is currently spending her third winter in a makeshift shelter where she moved after her house was destroyed in the 2015 Nepal earthquakes. A resident of Thakle village in Nepal’s Kabhrepalanchowk district, Mailee Thamang has been working alone to clear land for the foundation of her new house. Her shanty structure, made of light wood and corrugated tin sheets held together by wire, was meant to last for a few months. “My husband works as a security guard in Malaysia so I am alone here. It is extremely uncomfortable living like this, but I have no choice,” she says.

Like Mailee Thamang’s, 0.7 million houses were destroyed by two earthquakes measuring 7.8 and 7.3 on the Richter Scale that rocked Nepal in April and May 2015. Three years on, just 13 per cent of the houses have been reconstructed, as per Nepal’s National Reconstruction Authority (NRA), the nodal agency executing the country’s rehabilitation plans. Another 36 per cent of the houses are currently under construction.

The magnitude of the delay can be understood when one considers that the Nepal government had initially announced that the construction work will be over within six months. “Although the government wanted to finish reconstruction within six months, we knew that the process would take up to five years. So we had suggested that temporary accommodation be designed for this time period,” says Bijay Krishna Upadhyaya, director and earthquake technology training specialist at the National Society for Earthquake Technology (NSET), a 24-year old non-profit involved with earthquake rescue and rehabilitation in South Asia.

Slow to act