Bhattedanda Milkway

Making Markets Accessible to Marginalised Farmers

MADHUKAR UPADHYA

BIRTH OF AN IDEA

In March 1990, the villagers of Ikudol VDC of Lalitpur District south of Kathmandu invited a team from the Bagmati Watershed Project (BWP), a joint venture of HMG/N and the European Union (EU), to study a landslide in a locality called Chila, which lies beyond the valley of Tungan Khola. Chila is about a five- to seven-hour walk from the road at Tinpane (Figure 8.1). The landslide threatened three houses located close to its head, and the villagers wanted the team to suggest protection measures. We spent the afternoon inspecting the landslide and, because it was late in the evening when we finished, we had no choice but to spend the night in the village.

The woman of the house we opted to stay in arrived at about 7:30 in the evening, when it was almost dark, with a load of firewood. She welcomed us inside and served us a bowl of buffalo milk. Then she borrowed some rice and mustard leaves (saag) from her neighbour and started cooking a meal for her three children and us. While the rice was cooking, she milked, fed and bedded down her two buffaloes. At about

9:30 PM, when she put her children to bed, washed the dishes and cleaned the kitchen, we assumed she would go to sleep, which is what we ourselves had hoped to do. To our surprise, she lit a kerosene lamp, and, after making a larger fire, she began boiling about five litres of milk to make khuwa (the thick paste left after reducing milk). Since the room was full of smoke, we could not sleep and instead began talking with her as she continuously stirred the milk and regulated the fire.

She was worried. The landslide had already washed away some of her land and the remaining parcels, even though they produced only enough for six months,

had to be protected as a primary source of food for her family. To sustain themselves for the rest of the year, her family had no choice but to raise buffaloes, convert milk into khuwa, and sell it in Chapagaun in South Lalitpur, the trading town nearest Ikudol. The income generated was enough for her to meet the needs of the family for the remaining six months.

She told us that every day she used about three times more firewood to produce khuwa than to cook meals and that every family of Chila produced about four kilogrammes of khuwa every day (Figure 8.2). When we asked her why she didn’t sell fresh milk to a dairy company, she replied that she was unable to carry the milk to the closest collection centre at Tinpane fast enough. It was a five-hour walk and the milk would curdle before reaching the collection centre. Khuwa, in contrast, does not curdle and would survive the ten-hour walk to Chapagaun. She was well aware that selling milk was more profitable than selling khuwa, and said that, if conditions were favourable, she would rather sell milk.

All night I thought about khuwa and especially about the astounding quantity of firewood burnt and drudgery involved. The BWP focused on reforestation as one measure for stabilising landslides, but compared to the amount of firewood burnt to produce khuwa, our efforts appeared insignificant. Conventional watershed management tools focussed only on building retaining walls and check dams and on afforesting catchments; linkages with the development practices of the people themselves were very limited. We had no idea about the marketing of milk or how villagers could be provided with alternative opportunities so that they would not have to make khuwa.

The challenge for watershed management as it unfolded before us was both to preserve the forest and to enable farmers to market milk instead of khuwa. Focusing only on reforestation without providing any means to transport milk to the collection centre and thereby stop khuwaproduction would be insufficient. If milk could be transported, khuwa need not be made. In consequence, less firewood would be burned and the forest would be preserved. But how could milk be transported from the village to the collecting point so that it would not curdle? First, we thought of laying a high-density polythene pipeline to convey milk, like drinking water, under pressure. We rejected this possibility because the pipeline would have to be cleaned daily before pouring in a new batch of milk. There was not enough water to do this and even if there were, we could not be sure that the pipe would get cleaned enough to prevent the milk from curdling. We considered stretching a steel cable across the valley and using it to transport fresh milk to the roadhead in a much shorter time. Thus the concept of a milkway began to emerge.

In 1995, a ropeway, which was officially called a conservation ropeway, was built at Bhattedanda to transport milk and discourage the forest-consuming trade of khuwa. For five years it enabled the villagers of Ikudol to transport milk and brought them a new sense of hope. It ceased to operate in early 2001. Then, when all hope of its being re-opened seemed to have vanished, it resumed milk transportation again in August 2002. This chapter describes the roller-coaster history of the successes and failures of this initiative and draws lessons for future developments in ropeway technology.

POLITICAL ECONOMY OF KHUWA PRODUCTION

By 1993, many of us working for the BWP were convinced that burning wood to produce khuwaled to the high rate of deforestation in the project area (the southern parts of the districts of Lalitpur and Kavrepalanchok). Depending upon the type of firewood, it takes three to five kilogrammes of firewood to produce one kilogramme of khuwa from four litres of milk. This is the direct cost of production. Khuwa making also involves many other indirect costs. It entails drudgery, particularly for the women who collect firewood. During firewood collection young plants are trampled while important tree species and fodder are cut; these activities degrade the landscape’s biomass. Time is another hidden and intangible cost. To make one kilogramme ofkhuwa about four litres of milk has to be constantly stirred at boiling temperature for about two hours. Family members, including babies, involuntarily inhale smoke from fires in open hearths to the detriment of their health (Upadhya, 1993). These costs are not reflected in the selling price ofkhuwa, which is far less than that of fresh milk. We will discuss this difference later, but first let us look at khuwa-making as a source of livelihood in the mountainous areas of South Lalitpur.

The history of khuwa production in South Lalitpur is not very old. Local villagers suggest that people moved into these mountains about 150 to 200 years ago and began raising livestock as their source of livelihood. Farming came later. They raised cows and buffaloes and with the milk, produced ghiu (clarified butter). Ghiu is used as cooking oil, to light holy lamps and to prepare traditional sweets (mithai). It is also sold in Kathmandu to earn cash.

Small though it was, the capital did have a mithai market and needed khuwa. The price that khuwafetched was roughly 75 per cent higher than that of ghiu. When they discovered that sellingkhuwa was more profitable than selling ghiu, villagers of Nallu, Bhardeo, Dalchoki, Bukhel, Bhattedanda, Malta switched to making khuwa. These villages are less than one day’s walk from Chapagaun where khuwa is sold. Villages further south across Tungan Khola Valley, including Ikudol, Asrang and Gimdi, are more than a day’s walk from Chapagaun. In these villages, farmers make ghiu even today.

Chapagaun in Southern Kathmandu Valley is the nearest market in which farmers of South Lalitpur can sell their khuwa. The merchants of Chapagaun also buy brooms, agricultural produces, herbs and ghiu from farmers and, in turn, sell them kerosene, salt, animal feed, clothes and farm tools. This market is controlled by the merchants, who fix the prices of the goods bought. The relationship is asymmetric and imbalanced but farmers prefer conducting transactions in Chapagaun because they are based on tradition and long-standing relationships. Although downtown Patan is only about 10 kilometres away and a regular bus service operates between Chapagaun and Patan, farmers prefer to buy and sell in Chapagaun because traders there allow them to make purchases on credit during festivals like Dasain or Tihar, whereas merchants in Patan do not.

The merchants of Chapagaun also provide farmers with loans to buy buffaloes— with conditions attached that is. Typically, an indebted farmer must sell khuwa to a trader at a rate lower than the prevailing one until the loan is paid off. Despite the strings attached and the high interest rates, farmers turn to Chapagaun traders because they do not have to offer collateral; the loan provided is based on mutual trust rooted in tradition. Securing a formal loan from a bank involves lengthy bureaucratic procedures, proof of citizenship and putting up collateral. Such high transaction costs force farmers, especially khuwa producers, to turn to moneylenders, who honour a farmer’s social assets like family networks and long-standing connections.

Generally, milk producers are better off than khuwa producers while ghiu producers are the poorest (Figure 8.3). Farmers who live less than three hours away from the roadhead sell fresh milk to the Diary Development Corporation (DC). Most of their houses have corrugated galvanised iron (CGI) sheet roofs and their children go to school and even to college. Farmers who live further away across the first valley can only sell khuwa. Although they work harder than milk sellers, their houses have thatched roofs and their children do not attend school beyond the secondary level. Still further south across the second valley, about 9 to 12 hours from the roadhead, where farmers can export only ghiu, their living conditions are worse. Most people live in single-storey thatched-roof houses and their children do not go to school beyond the primary level. Economic conditions thus seem to decline as proximity to markets decreases. The Bhattedanda Milkway was one attempt to alter the negative economic gradient by finding access to market for locally produced milk 

Khuwa production is a lose-lose venture for farmers and the environment. Because of high consumption of firewood, forests in khuwa producing areas have declined rapidly. And despite their hard work, farmers do not benefit from selling khuwa as middlemen and traders corner most of the profit. When farmers bring khuwa to Chapagaun, the merchants first test its purity using iodine and adulterated batches are rejected. The merchants may then reprocess the khuwa (sometimes by mixing in maize flour) before taking it to Kathmandu for sale. In Kathmandu,khuwa may fetch higher price than in Chapagaun. Thus the traders of Chapagaun profit from the chain of khuwa economics, while farmers are often forced to sell at low prices due to seasonal gluts. In spite of the disadvantages, economic necessity forced thousands of families to makekhuwa till the early 1980s.

Things began to change towards the end of 1981. In September of that year, an unprecedented cloudburst hit South Lalitpur.1 Landslides damaged cultivated terraces and rivers washed away land parcels. The event destroyed the local economy, impoverished farmers and affected the food balance. The amount of local biomass was reduced as trees and other vegetation was washed away by the torrent. One way to compensate for the loss of agricultural income was to produce more khuwa, but because firewood was insufficient, farmers could not continue making khuwaand thereby lost a mere source of income. Ghiu could be manufactured but did not fetch enough money to support families. Many families in the area faced three years of hardship. The crisis forced farmers of South Lalitpur, who had been hit by the cloudburst to seek alternative sources of livelihood.

Two energetic farmers, one from Bukhel and the other from Ghusel, contacted a private dairy and asked it to collect their milk at Tikabhairab and Lele, villages that were connected to Kathmandu by a fair weather road on which a milk-collecting van could ply. The private dairy company began collecting milk brought to Tikabhairab and Lele by farmers of these two villages; the van left for Kathmandu at 11 AM. Because selling milk was more profitable and because khuwa making had become increasingly difficult due to the lack of firewood, many other farmers who could reach Tikabhairab or Lele before 11 AM also began selling milk. The volume of milk brought to these two places gradually increased until the private company could no longer buy all of it. At this point the farmers requested the DC to collect their milk; it began to do so circa 1985/86. Once the DC milk tanker began servicing Lele and Tikabhairab, still more farmers started selling milk.

A profitable milk business emerged. Following the disaster of 1981, HMG/N implemented development activities in South Lalitpur. After fair-weather road between Lele and Chandanpur was completed, the milk business spread to other villages further off. In 2001/02, South Lalitpur supplied between 15,000 and 18,000 litres of milk to the DC and another 6,500 litres to three private dairy companies every day. An additional 2,000-3,000 litres of milk was sold to local consumers and teashops.2 By selling milk farmers received better prices than they had by sellingkhuwa. The benefit was obvious because one kilogramme of khuwa fetched Rs 45 (at 1993 prices), whereas the equivalent milk (4.17 litres on average) sold for Rs 53 to Rs 65, provided that the fat content was greater than 5.7 per cent (Figure 8.5), which, incidentally, is the break-even point between the price of khuwa and that of milk. Higher fat content makes the sale of milk even more profitable. The average fat content of milk in Ikudol, for example, was around 7.5 per cent, which meant that milk would fetch 30 per cent more money than khuwa (Upadhya, 1993).

Despite these changes more than 1,000 families which live far away from the roadhead beyond the Tungan Valley still convert 5,000-7,000 litres of milk into khuwa daily. In one month they sell about 30 tonnes of khuwa; this implies that there is a great stress on the existing forests. One of the reasons for the continued production of khuwa is that these villagers cannot get their milk to the collecting centre fast enough; for them, it is more than a five hours walk, within which time, the milk curdles. In South Lalitpur, proximity to a market determines which of three dairy products— milk, khuwa, or ghiu—a farmer produces. The varied impacts their production has on the land and forests helps determine the living conditions of the producer.

BUILDING THE MILKWAY

Having identified what may be called the root cause of khuwa production, the main challenge before the BWP team was to find ways of helping villagers transport milk to the collecting centres so they could take advantage of the market. We thought of stretching a steel cable across the valley to slide milk cans to the roadhead. The proposal seemed technically possible if the speed, which, we found, could reach as high as 300 kilometres per hour, could be controlled. Since this could not be done with a single rope without powered machines, this idea, like the pipe, was rejected. We finally focused on installing a ropeway with a winch mechanism to regulate speed. In 1993, the BWP management team made a study tour of the Austrian Alps to observe different types of winches and ropeways, including the heavy-load carriers used to transport construction materials and timber. The team also observed ropeways used by individual farmers to transport grass from high pastures to their farms as well as those run by owners of tourist resorts who transported food and beverages for trekkers and skiers.

As a pilot project, we decided to establish a single carrier, bi-cable ropeway system to carry up to 450 kilogrammes per trip. The ropeway was to be three kilometres long and connect Jhankridanda and Bhattedanda. Farmers of Ikudol would transport their fresh milk to Bhattedanda, from where it would be transported to Jhankridanda using the ropeway and then by truck to the collection centre. Once the overall system was agreed upon, a short-term Austrian consultant was hired to help design the foundations and towers and to supervise their fabrication. Five towers were proposed;

The consultant assisted the BWP in ascertaining which components could be manufactured locally in Nepal and which needed to be imported from India or from Europe. Anchor bolts for towers, the main stand of the revolving station and the driving stations required steel of high quality and tensile strength, which was not available locally. The main motor and accessories such as pulleys and shoes, which had to be of better quality and precision than could be found locally, were imported from Austria. The steel cable was imported from India while the towers were fabricated at Balaju Yantra Shala (BYS) in Kathmandu. An Indian-made 20-kVA diesel generator was purchased in Kathmandu as the prime mover. Because only a few specialised companies manufactured these tailor-made parts, the costs were relatively high (Annex C).

Construction of the foundations, towers, and stations began in the winter of 1994. The BWP provided cement, steel bars, and aggregate. The villagers of Bhattedanda formed the Ropeway Construction Committee (RCC) in order to maximise local labour contributions. Most of the members of the RCC were people from Bhattedanda, as was its chairperson, who was also the VDC chief. Some farmers from Ikudol were also members, but they couldn’t oversee the daily work as they lived at least three hours away from the construction sites. The BWP did not seek contributions of free labour; instead, local workers were paid the going rates. Since the task of installing a ropeway was unfamiliar to the villagers, skilled workers from Kathmandu were also hired. BWP staff helped RCC members and local labourers to maintain the quality and precision required for the foundations, some of which, like the ones for the tilted towers, were specialised and particularly difficult to build. Once the towers were transported to their respective sites, local labourers erected them with help from the skilled workers from Kathmandu.

The installation of the drive equipment and cables started about one year later, after the towers had been erected and other infrastructure was in place. The BWP hired an erector from Gantner Company in Austria, who stayed at the project site for six weeks. Stretching the cable was the most difficult task of the entire installation process. It required more than 100 people each day to pull the steel wire across the terrain. Some villagers and students from the local high school worked voluntarily for two days to pull one cable. The villagers who pulled the remaining four cables were paid for their efforts by the BWP. Two Land Rover jeeps were used at Jhankridanda (the driving station at the road) to pre-tension the cable while a hand-operated max-puller was used for final tensioning. A test run was carried out at the end of May 1995, after installations were complete. Unfortunately, the ropeway was too low and the loaded carrier, which was supposed to be at least two metres above the ground at the lowest points, hit the ground. We had to increase the height of towers nos. 6, 5 and 3 by one or two metres each and add an extra 18-metre-high tower, tower no. 4 (see Figure 8.6).

The ropeway, appropriately named the Bhattedanda Milkway, began operating on 9 June, 1995. The RCC was dissolved and the Ropeway Operating Committee (ROC) set up to manage daily operation and regular maintenance. Since the ROC was formed as a long-term business, its members included those involved in the construction work, some village elite, two milk producers from Ikudol, the dudh thekedar (milk contractor) who handled milk transportation, and the chairperson of Bhattedanda VDC. Even though the ROC included only a few of the actual Milkway users, it also acted as a Ropeway Users’ Committee (RUC), a fact which made it easy to register the ROC at the District Administrative Office (DAO) and to hand over responsibility of its management.

BENEFITS OF THE MILKWAY

Despite the initial scepticism of many of our official colleagues, we were confident that once the Milkway began to operate a steady stream of benefits would accrue to the people, whose income could rise by as much as 30 per cent. We were not wrong. The Milkway provided access to the market to farmers who lived four to eight hours from the road. Every day 143 households in Ikudol used the Milkway to sell fresh milk. They lived within a three-hour walk from the low end of the Milkway and had made khuwa prior to its installation. Collectively they sold between 600 and 900 litres of fresh milk every day. This volume sold for Rs 15,000 to 20,000 (1995 prices). Had it been turned into khuwa it would only have fetched them just Rs 11,000 to 14,000. By selling fresh milk, farmers earned an additional 4,000 to 6,000 rupees (BWP, 1997).

Several categories of people benefited from the Milkway. The primary beneficiaries were the farmers of Ikudol who exported milk daily. The second group of beneficiaries were the farmers of Bhattedanda who exported seasonal vegetables and other farm produce once a week. Finally, local merchants, construction contractors, local cooperatives and development workers who used it occasionally to transport their goods also benefited. Some benefits were totally unintended. The Milkway was not designed for passengers and hence, except for the Milkway operator and some project staff that rode the Milkway for maintenance, ferrying people was strictly prohibited. But once, in an emergency, an expectant mother who experienced complications during delivery was taken in the Milkway carrier to the road, where a vehicle was found to take her to hospital. Even though it was a significant bending of safety rules, using the Milkway saved both the mother and her child.

The Milkway also helped farmers to export ghum (local umbrellas made of tree leaves), herbs, brooms, cucumbers, and pumpkins. The District Agriculture Office had earlier formed 19 groups of women farmers to promote vegetable farming. These women farmers were the first to take advantage of the Milkway to export vegetables from Bhattedanda. Half of the groups used the Milkway to send vegetables and curd to a weekly market in Lagankhel in Patan and earned about Rs 10,000 every week; the other groups were not yet ready to do so. The income from the sale of vegetables and curd belonged to the individual women who sold them. Many women from Ikudol exported marigolds during the festival of Tihar in 1995; the total value sold was Rs 10,000.3 Farmers also transported zinc sheets, polythene pipes, and oddly shaped pipes difficult to carry along narrow winding trails.

The Milkway employed five operators and three helpers to operate the system. The principal operator ran the machine in Jhankridanda. Two assistants helped him handle goods. In Bhattedanda, a single operator handled goods and an accountant kept the books. They were all paid by the ROC using income from the Milkway. Twenty porters were employed by milk producers to carry milk from the villages to the station in Bhattedanda. The Milkway also created jobs for seven persons who collected milk from and kept records of the milk containers sent by farmers. The cooperative at Chhabeli collected the milk to send to the DC. Seven loaders were employed to transfer milk containers from the Milkway terminal in Jhankridanda to the milk van. The cooperative paid the porters and loaders and the expense was added to the cost of transporting milk. The loaders also were paid to carry other goods by the owners of those goods.

Within 18 months, several proxy indicators showed that the Milkway had had a positive impact on the wellbeing of the milk producers in Ikudol. First, the proportion of houses with CGI roofs increased from 16 to 26 per cent. CGI roofs have several advantages over thatched roofs: they last longer, pose no fire hazard, and are a symbol of social prestige. Many had CGI roofs even over their cowsheds, indicating they had about Rs 10,000 to spare. The proportion of improved cowsheds increased from about four to over 12 per cent of the total. Another improvement noted was the construction of separate cowsheds. Similarly, there was an increase of six per cent in the proportion of two-storey houses. Food balances also improved: the proportion of farmers reporting a food deficit of six months or more declined from 55 to 45 per cent while the proportion of households with a food sufficiency of 12 months or more increased from 11 to 19 per cent. The proportion of households owning lahure buffaloes, an improved breed, increased from 26 to 45 per cent. The average number of low-yielding local cows per household was halved.4

In Ikudol, by rendering khuwa production unnecessary, the Milkway reduced the consumption of an estimated 1,000 kilogrammes of firewood per day, or at least 300 tonnes per year (BWP, 1997). The savings may not mean much in terms of economic value, but by saving firewood the Milkway enhanced the local environment. First, it reduced pressure on forests and demonstrated that sustainable harvesting is a concept worth pursuing. Second, reduced consumption of firewood meant that fewer people entered forest and consequently that fewer young plants were trampled. Third, the drudgery of foraging in the forest every day was reduced.

The Milkway transported a maximum of 65,000 kilogrammes of goods in one month (Table 8.1 and Figure 8.7) and its highest monthly income was Rs 71,580.

This also included the fees charged to carry other types of goods. In one-and-a-half years of operation (1995-1996), the Milkway earned about Rs 386,000, approximately Rs 218,000 of which was spent on operation and maintenance (Table 8.2 and Figure 8.8). The amount spent also included the cost of correcting the alignment of some pulleys. The cost of operating the Milkway was about Rs 8,000 per month, which was spent on the salaries of its five operators and on diesel for the generator. The Milkway provided benefits to the local community, the local environment and showed that, if replicated, several such efforts could add positively to the country’s development.

After the road to Chhabeli was opened in February 1996, the monthly load declined sharply, as will be discussed subsequently.

LESSONS FROM THE FIELD

Despite the obvious benefits of the Milkway, many problems arose at different stages of the project. They ranged from the lack of a skilled workforce, which was a major hindrance, to problems related to decision-making and lack of understanding among authorities in ministries, departments, and funding agencies. This section attempts to document the hurdles faced by this pilot initiative in watershed management in Nepal.

Planning phase

At the conceptual level, the tasks of watershed management in Nepal are viewed only as reforestation, protection of forests and stabilisation of landslides and gullies. Overt management strategies do not include improving the livelihoods of villagers through implementing income-generating activities or reducing drudgery. When the idea of constructing a ropeway emerged, the first question raised was why a watershed management project should implement a transportation-related activity. The officials of the Ministry of Forest and Soil Conservation (MoFSC) argued that constructing a ropeway was the responsibility of the MoWT. A ropeway, this view suggested, could only connect two towns (e.g. Hetauda and Kathmandu, the historical example in Nepal). The Ministry initially did not accept that a ropeway had links with the wellbeing of milk producers and with forest protection. Analysis of the economics and impact of khuwaproduction has never been, nor is it now, a part of the official discourse on natural resource management. The BWP had to go through several cycles of meetings in Nepal and Brussels before it could convince the authorities that a ropeway was far more cost effective than conventional watershed management activities such as building check dams or afforestation.

In finding a power supply, too, the BWP faced resistance from authorities. The lack of a back-up for the 20-kVA diesel generator compromised the reliability of the system. The grid was far away, so a better solution seemed to be constructing a 25­kW MHP at Thosne Khola and placing the diesel generator on standby. This obvious solution, however, led to serious inter-ministerial disputes within the MoFSC and was not pursued further.

Procurement policy limits

According to HMG/N rules in force at that time, equipment worth more than Rs 150,000 could be purchased only through tender and the lowest bidder had to be accepted as the supplier unless there was a strong reason to reject its offer. In practice, rejection was almost impossible as several statutory bodies were ready to pounce on any project manager who entertained higher bids with charges of corruption. To avoid the rigidity of the government’s rule, the EU was asked, and agreed, to provide the necessary equipment and accessories in the form of commodity aid. The equipment was manufactured and supplied by the Gantner Company of Austria. This procedure added time, but the quality of the ropeway’s components was ensured.

The towers, steel cables and generators for the ropeway were purchased using regular tendering procedures. The construction of the foundations and other structures was carried out through the RCC. The motor, control panel, communication system, pulleys, and ropeway shoes were purchased from reputed suppliers. As this was a pilot project venturing into unknown territory, the selection of suppliers should have been guided by the need to avoid trouble during operation; instead, government policies dictated choice. To cite one negative consequence, the generator bought from the lowest bidder in an open tendering bid broke down after a month. Before it could be fixed, milk worth Rs 20,000 curdled in a single day and many farmers were left unhappy with the RUC.

Detailed survey

The detailed survey considered the alignment of ridges and valleys close to the stations but did not prepare a complete profile. As a result of this oversight, when operations started, the cable sagged and touched smaller ridges. To overcome this flaw, the heights of three towers had to be increased and an additional tower had to be erected.

Trees posed another problem. The erector from Gantner had advised that trees be cut and bushes cleared along a three-metre-wide land strip below the alignment in order to ease the hoisting of cables. However, since we wanted to save as many trees as possible, we decided to cut only those that actually came in the way. With this goal in mind, we felled only five mature trees, though hundreds of branches were cut. This decision ended up creating a major hurdle during the pre-tensioning of the cables: since many trees remained along the path of the ropeway, the cable sometimes got caught in them. The problem was that once this happened it was risky to cut the offending tree as felling it could cause the cable, which is under tension, to snap or create a dangerous whiplash.

Cable transporting and pulling

The towers were partly pre-welded and transported to Jhankridanda by mini trucks, and then to their respective sites by twenty human porters each. It was a difficult and risky operation. Transporting cables to the site was another dangerous feat. The general practice for transporting steel cables for suspension bridges in the mountains is to unwind the cable from the reel and employ as many porters as required so that each porter supports two to three meters of cable. In Bhattedanda, it was not possible to use this procedure because the skyline cable was more than three kilometres long and the hauling cable, more than six kilometres long. Both cables were wrapped around reels, each of which weighed about three tonnes, and small trucks were used to carry them to the roadhead. Because of the concentrated loads of the reels, the floors of the trucks were damaged as they negotiated jerks on the earthen road. Unloading the reels at Jhankridanda had to be done with great care and proved to be very difficult. At that time private helicopter companies were rare, but today perhaps reels could be ferried to sites by helicopters despite the additional expense (see chapters 9, 10 and 11).

Pulling the cables across the valley and over the ridges was another difficult task. More than 100 persons pulled the cable along the steep alignment and an additional 10 to 15 people were needed to unwind the reel at the roadhead. Coordinating work among those hoisting the cable spread over three kilometres and the unwinders of the reel at the roadhead was extremely difficult. Once the reel started to unwind, it was difficult to stop because of increasing momentum. We had no walkie­talkie sets with which to communicate so we used red and white flags for signalling. When reel operators did not receive messages in time, people pulled the rope when they should have stopped and stopped when they should have continued pulling. As a result, in many places the released cable piled up and twisted into knots. Hundreds of knots had to be undone before the cable could be pulled again. Knot formation also compromised the cable’s integrity and strength.

The safety of those pulling the cables was a major concern. When the cable was first pulled, it was on the ground some meters away from its actual alignment. While pre-tensioning, the cable slowly lifted from the ground and gradually moved towards its alignment, at which position its final tension was about five tonnes. If the cable got stuck in trees while moving towards its alignment the tension instantly increased to eight to ten tonnes. The blocking tree had to be removed before further tension was applied, and any mistake while removing it put workers in danger. We told the persons who cut down the trees to stand on the opposite side of the cable, but we could not see or continue to advise them: we had no choice but to rely on their wisdom. Despite our inexperience, we were lucky that only two sustained injuries: one person fell from a tree and hurt his face, and a log used as a braking device to stop the moving reel flew from the rolling drum and hit me on the head. Fortunately, I survived to write this chapter.

Limits to participation

According legal status to the RUC, which was formed after the RCC was dissolved, posed another knotty problem. Under the prevailing government acts, only three types of users’ committees are legal: a group of people forming a club to work voluntarily for the benefit of society becomes legal when it is registered at a DAO, a shareholding company can be registered under the Company Act, and a cooperative, which must distribute profit among members, gains legal status by registering under the Cooperative Act. The RUC, however, did not fall in any of these categories. It provided a service, but it was not a voluntarily operation. On the contrary, the Milkway charged for its services so that it could function and provide a level of reliability only achieved by ensuring good maintenance. Although money was earned, the villagers did not receive any; all profit remained with the RUC. Getting the legal status of the RUC recognised was, therefore, difficult. It was finally registered as a voluntary club at the request of the users themselves, but this classification invited subsequent problems.

Securing support from the users to install the ropeway through the RCC was difficult. Farmers who lived along the ropeway’s alignment were not its intended users; the actual beneficiaries lived far from the revolving station in Bhattedanda. They could not come to the construction site even if they wanted to because a one-way trip took three hours. Although, non-users were the main employees during construction, the support of both groups was necessary to make the Milkway operational. The people of Bhattedanda were to operate the Milkway and then its earnings would be used to extend it to Ikudol. Bhattedanda folks, however, made no serious effort in pursuing an extension, a situation which understandably frustrated the villagers of Ikudol, for whom it was not practical to get involved in daily operations. Had the problems of lack of interest in Bhattedanda and helplessness in Ikudol been sorted out early on, perhaps the Milkway would not have ceased operating.

The management of a ropeway requires that operators possess basic operation and maintenance skills. In the first few months, the local users were given on-the-job training in operation and maintenance. They learned to successfully perform minor tasks such as tightening tower bolts, fixing pulley alignments, and greasing and oiling but they were not able to handle major breakdowns. In the first six months, the alignment of the cable was carefully checked but the pulleys were dislocated anyway. Its alignment shifted due to loose nuts and bolts and the system was damaged. The cable had to be re-tensioned two times in two years with the help of a mechanic from Kathmandu. The manufacturing company recommended that every two years the skyline rope be moved about six metres from its original position towards the lower station to avoid excessive wearing of the part of the cable resting on the shoes and to prolong the life of the rope. Such details of mechanical engineering cannot be easily transferred to new users in a short time.

Qualified technicians who can repair a ropeway’s electro-mechanical parts must provide back-up support. Such technicians are not available locally and skilled persons from Kathmandu see no appeal living in a remote place like Bhattedanda just to provide services to a single ropeway. This is a major institutional challenge that needs to be tackled by both the industry and the government if efforts to promote ropeways are to be sustainable.

END OF THE BEGINNING

The residents of Ikudol and Bhattedanda VDCs agreed to work together to construct the Milkway. To jointly own the Milkway, the users and the operators had to develop a unique understanding and partnership, but it turned out that Milkway demanded more than what villagers knew about uniting to work together. After January 1996, goods traffic on the Milkway declined sharply because the road to Chhabeli was opened to milk-collecting vehicles. Local support in Bhattedanda for the Milkway waned as the people there felt they could do without it. The people of Ikudol had no control over these changes. BWP’s technical support for repair and maintenance gradually declined.

The RUC, which had been made fully responsible for managing the Milkway, carried out the regular maintenance of pulleys, cables, and towers; and it established contacts with technicians in Kathmandu who could maintain the generator. When the EU’s funding for the BWP stopped in May 1997, the project office could only provide minimal backstopping support. Because of limited funding, the skyline cable was not moved six metres from its position at the shoes as had been recommended. We did not expect the RUC to move the cable itself since this involved risky procedures; instead, we hoped to execute this task ourselves in the second phase of the BWP, due to begin in July 1997, when the Milkway would be extended. But the second phase had not started even in November, at which time the villagers reported that one of the pulleys was badly worn out. The RUC hired a technician to check the pulley, and he reported that the skyline cable at the shoes had also worn out more than expected.

The situation demanded that the skyline cable be adjusted even if the BWP had no funds available. Because we could not hire skilled labours and because experienced technicians were not available locally, we decided to move the cable with the villagers who had helped install the Milkway. As we could not afford to buy new max pullers or quality grips, we were forced to use the old tools left in the store room after installation.

November in Bhattedanda is cold: nighttime temperatures fall below freezing. To add to our difficulties, it started raining as we left for the site. When we reached Bhattedanda, the intensity of rainfall had increased and it had began snowing on the ridges. Since we had already spent a week organising the repairs by bringing staff and skilled technicians together and the users had decided that the repairs would be done that day, we started the work despite the bad weather.

Releasing six metres of cable from the driving station was done easily. Because of the shortness of November days and the drizzling rain, we didn’t really have enough time to pull the cable from the revolving station to provide the necessary tension. However, since shutting down the Milkway for even a day would incur losses of about Rs 20,000 worth of milk, we decided to work until late evening and complete the task so that Milkway would be ready for operation the next morning. Taking all necessary precautions, we managed to pull about five metres of the released cable. When the Milkway was installed all the tension was provided from the driving station. This time, we pulled the cable from the revolving station, a much harder task because of the extra sag between the intermediate towers at higher elevations.

It was almost dark and still another metre of cable had to be pulled. We decided to take a break forkhaja (snack) at a nearby teashop after making sure that all the grips and the max pullers were properly tightened. No sooner had we started eating, than we were shaken by a sudden loud noise: it was as if a mountain had collapsed due to an earthquake. The noise echoed for some time. It wasn’t an earthquake, but none of us could figure out exactly what had happened.

Rushing to the station, we found that the cable had slipped off the grips because the low temperature had caused it to shrink. The max puller was nowhere in sight. So strong had been the force that the cable had sliced a tree with a 30-centimetre diameter like a knife slices a radish and had wound itself into ten loops around the tree stump. Fortunately, no one was hurt. The lessons were clear: the alignment of a Milkway should always avoid buildings and settlements and one has to be sensitive to temperature changes.

We thought that the Milkway had been irreparably damaged. What would farmers say when they came in the morning with their milk cans and found that the cable had snapped? We thought it would remain out of commission indefinitely and that farmers would have to carry their milk to the road for a few days. This accident would attach a stigma to the villager-run Milkway and critics would reject similar proposals in the future. Fortunately, it was winter and very cold, so the milk would not curdle fast. To get the system back into operation, the cable would have to be pulled from the ground as if a new cable were being strung. We made an extra effort to get the Milkway back on track in the next few days. With a new max-puller and sturdy grips bought on credit in Kathmandu, it took two days to pull the cable to the lower station and an extra day to tighten it. Then much to our relief, the Milkway came back into operation.

I asked the chairperson of the RUC if he still recommended extending the Milkway after all the high drama. He said, ‘I’m not sure if we want to do new milkways but this one must be extended to the next ridge south (Majhkhanda), no matter how difficult it is. People on the other side of the valley must not be deprived of the benefits of selling milk and improving their living conditions’.

BEGINNING OF THE END

Despite its obvious benefits, the Bhattedanda Milkway stopped operating in January 2001 after providing more than five years of service. The main reason was that with the opening of the road from Jhankridanda to Chhabeli, the trucks which had once collected milk only in Jhankridanda, now began collection in Chhabeli.

The performance of the Milkway also started to decline for several other reasons. The real users in Ikudol were happy to have access to a market via the Milkway but they did not want to be dictated to by the operators and the dudh thekedar in Bhattedanda. The users even argued that unless the government guaranteed the extension of the Milkway to Majhkhanda they would not use the existing one. The partnership between the users in Ikudol and the operators in Bhattedanda did not improve and local politics took over. Neither the users nor the operators could influence thedudh thekedar, who had final authority over whether to send milk by the Milkway or by truck.

Because the idea of a ropeway was born in the village of Chila in Ikudol VDC, the people there had expected that a ropeway would be built nearby. In fact, the feasibility study had recommended that the ropeway be constructed between Majhkhanda and Bhattedanda but this proposal had entailed some practical difficulties. Farmers would have had to send milk by ropeway to Bhattedanda, from where it would have had to be carried by porters in Bhattedanda to the roadhead at Jhankridanda. To avoid this complication we decided instead that the pilot ropeway would be built between Bhattedanda and Jhankridanda so that farmers from Ikudol could themselves carry milk to Bhattedanda and send it to Jhankridanda. The BWP told the farmers in Ikudol that if the ropeway proved to be as effective as expected, it would subsequently be extended to Majhkhanda and Chila; and the farmers accepted this proposal in good faith. In a sense, the layout of the Milkway was influenced more by the BWP’s view of itself as a promoter and its concerns with ease of construction and demonstration effect, than the interest of the villagers in the deep hinterlands.

When the Milkway was completed in 1995, it served 143 households and transported a maximum of 900 litres of milk before 9 AM each day. It could have collected milk from other farmers but it would have had to operate beyond 9 AM, when the milk van left Jhankridanda. The existing volume of milk, however, was too low to warrant hiring a second van. Extending the Milkway to Majhkhanda would have brought in an additional 1,000 to 1,500 litres of milk and the efficiency of the entire Milkway system would have increased. For this reason an extension was proposed in 1996.5 The plan was to extend the Milkway in two directions and to build two separate systems. One system would stretch about four kilometres from the existing turn-around station at Bhattedanda, connecting the southern village of Pyutar and crossing Majhkhanda on the ridge top. The other system, was to be about 2.5-kilometres-long, would run to the village of Chila south-east of Bhattedanda. We also proposed building an MHP that would generate about 20 kW (enough to run the Milkway) in a stretch of Thosne Khola in Bhattedanda.6

Phase II of the BWP, which was re-named the Bagmati Integrated Watershed Management Project (BIWMP), started in 1998. A new consulting company provided technical assistance and a new team of support staff was introduced. This phase was supposed to employ staff from Phase I, but, due to the long delay in its implementation, many personnel had already left and the Ministry had transferred others. Only a few old staff members remained.

The people in Ikudol were not happy that the first ropeway had been built in Bhattedanda and that its extension was discussed, surveyed, and estimated again and again, but never built. This happened despite the glowing encouragement of all high-level dignitaries who visited the Milkway (see Box). The assumption that the ropeway would be extended to Ikudol once the pilot project showed its effectiveness proved false and the people south of Bhattedanda became disillusioned with politicians and with the Milkway.

Source: Visitor’s Book at the Bhattedanda Milkway

The political instability which followed the second general election in 1995 began to have an effect at the local level. The UML government left office within nine months and was followed by a series of coalition governments culminating in the third general election in 1999. Horse-trading between members of parliament to make up a simple majority became the norm. Party representatives fought for perks and benefits, thereby severely obstructing the administration and functioning of government departments. Donor-supported projects became the first victims because they had financial resources subject to misuse by self-serving officials in cahoots with politicians.7 The BIWMP and the Milkway became victims of this situation. The knowledge and the lessons gained through experience during Phase I gained through experience faded away and were not passed on to Phase II.

The political scene at the centre was replicated at the village level, too. Development works initiated by one candidate were anathema to others, who used all means to discredit projects as hotbeds of corruption, malpractice and inefficiency. Villagers were divided in their support of different political parties. Sometimes the division ran so deep that the supporters of each political party patronised separate shops and teashops and influential villagers would not support a development activity unless their own party came in to power. Over the years the fine line dividing political parties and their supporters grew deeper and more pronounced in Bhattedanda as well.

The first VDC chairperson of Bhattedanda was a pradhan pancha (leader) for 17 years during the Panchayat era until multi-party democracy was restored in 1990. He joined the Nepali Congress party and was elected chairperson of the VDC in the first local elections held in 1992. In the second local election, however, the CPN (UML) candidate was victorious. The Milkway fell between the agendas of the local-level minions of the two parties. Consequently, the former chairperson lost interest and the new chairperson, who had not been consulted about initiating the Milkway, never developed any interest. Although he had not been elected, the former chairperson commanded substantial support in the village, and was nominated to be the chairperson of the RUC. He was not enthusiastic about this role. On the contrary, he used his influence to ensure that decisions regarding the control of the Milkway remained with him. He seemed to wish to drive home the point that without him things wouldn’t be the same and that by voting him out of position the villagers had made a mistake.

COOPERATIVE POLITICS AND INSTITUTIONAL COLLAPSE

Putting up a technical artefact such as a ropeway, difficult though it was, seems, with hindsight, relatively easy compared to the problem of organising milk production, collection and transport. The institutional aspects involve hundreds of farmers, many intermediaries, and very different institutional styles of working. In its own way, the politics of the milk cooperative also contributed to the demise of the Milkway. Before we discuss its actual modalities, it will be edifying to discuss the nature of the dairy business, which, in the mountains, involves more than just a buyer and a seller. Milk is collected from individual farmers by village-based cooperatives contracted to supply it to the DC. Each cooperative represents milk producers or a multipurpose cooperative registered with the DC. The secretary of the cooperative is entrusted with the task of collecting milk from the farmers and supplying it to the DC.* He plays a dominant role in the business.

Farmers bring fresh milk to the cooperative early each morning, usually before 9 AM, so that the milk contractor can take it to the nearest chilling centre before it curdles. The contractor records the fat content and the quantity of milk each farmer provides and collects it in 20 or 40-litre milk cans. The fat content varies from farmer

* The villagers call the secretary dudh thekedar.

to farmer and, even for a single farmer, from day to day. The contractor pays farmers according to the fat content rate fixed by the DC. The full milk cans are then transported to the chilling centre using porters and small trucks. At the chilling centre the milk is collected on behalf of the cooperative and the fat content and quantity (now in bulk) is again measured before it is dispatched to the main processing centre in Balaju. After the milk arrives at Balaju, it is processed and its quantity is adjusted, sometimes by mixing in water and powered milk, before it is distributed.

In the summer months, the milk contractor adds water and soda to the milk to keep it from curdling during transport. Adding water increases the volume of the milk but decreases its fat content. When the contractor adds water it is done to prevent milk which has not yet been chilled from curdling. If a milkcan is transported without adding water, milk rich in solid-not-fat (SNF)curdles very fast. Thapa (2002) observed that water is also added at the chilling centre, a practice which is difficult to understand as it unnecessarily increases the volume to be transported.

Farmers are paid on the basis of fat content only, whereas the DC pays the respective cooperatives separately for the fat, SNF, and lactose contents of their milk as well as for an additional 18 per cent of these components, termed ‘total solid (TS) commission’. Payment for SNF, lactose and TS commission covers the cost of transportation and the other expenses of the cooperatives.

The DC sends money to the bank account of each cooperative at Nepal Bank Limited in Chapagaun every two weeks. The secretary and the chairperson of each cooperative jointly withdraw this money to distribute to the farmer members. For each fat per cent per litre the farmers get Rs 2.70 (2001 price). The price was Rs 2.10 in 1995 when the Milkway was installed. When the milk reaches the chilling centre, its average fat content is usually less than at the collection point because water has been added. Since farmers are paid according to the original fat content, the contractor makes a profit because he increases the volume using water and transports more milk.

The relation between the secretary of the cooperative and the responsible official at the chilling centre is equally interesting. The two are the final authorities in deciding on fat content, which in the end dictates how much money the DC pays. The added water and fat content are then adjusted in the books. In this process the richness of the milk is degraded and the milk in fact becomes contaminated by water of uncertain quality taken from whatever springs and taps are available. The water added is usually not safe for drinking and goes untreated to the milk-processing centre. There is no mechanism for checking such adulteration.8 A farmer who complains about this practice, even in the name of dharma (citizen’s duty), is likely to be dropped from the cooperative. If a farmer is dropped, s/he is deprived of the only milk market available at her/his doorstep. Thus a farmer has no desire to annoy either the milk contractor or the chilling centre official.

As mentioned earlier, only registered cooperatives can collect and supply milk to the DC. It is the cooperative (or, more precisely, its secretary) that decides on the mode of transportation, not the milk producers themselves. The responsibility of milk producers ends as soon as they deliver their milk to the cooperative. The milk producers in Ikudol may have wanted to use the Milkway but if the secretary decided to use a truck or a minibus, so it was.

New milk producers in Ikudol (who produced khuwa until the Milkway was established), had no idea how to form their own cooperative even if they had possessed the confidence to do so. The milk business does involve some risks, particularly for the secretary who transfers milk from the village to the chilling centre. Since he has to pay for all losses if the milk curdles, he pays careful attention to the cleanliness of the milkcans. The negligence of just one farmer may spoil the whole batch of milk. A great deal of trust is also needed. Since the people in Ikudol felt they were too inexperienced to take this risk, they depended on the nearest cooperative, that of Bhattedanda. This cooperative began collecting milk from the area of Malta (west of Bhattedanda) at Chhabeli and sent it by truck to Jhankridanda. The same cooperative also collected milk from the farmers of Ikudol at Bhattedanda and sent it to Jhankridanda by the Milkway.

This arrangement of sending milk from Malta by truck and milk from Ikudol by the Milkway worked fine until the road that had once ended in Chhabeli was extended further west, nearer to the village of Malta, thereby bringing more farmers in contact with the milk market. The volume of milk from Malta gradually increased and surpassed the volume from Ikudol. While the number of farmers supplying milk using the Milkway remained almost the same, the dudh thekedar found it increasingly inconvenient to manage collection in two places and consequently asked the farmers from Ikudol to climb 15 minutes to deliver their milk to Chhabeli instead of leaving it in Bhattedanda. Porters were given incentives to transport milk cans to Chhabeli rather than to the Bhattedanda Milkway terminal: they were paid an extra 25 paisa per litre.

Another reason that the dudh thekedar chose to use the truck was that the Milkway charged for every litre of milk whereas the truck charged a fixed price for a trip, irrespective of the actual load. This made a big difference for the dudh thekedar as he could transport hundreds of litres for no extra cost in a truck. There were also complaints that Milkway operators mishandled the milk and that the dudh thekedar lost some milk in transportation. Similar complaints were made regarding other goods, some of which, farmers said, were stolen during transportation. The lack of a mechanism for monitoring was another major problem. While the political economy of milk introduced problems, the situation of the BIWMP led to new difficulties relating to follow up and monitoring.

Apart from once hiring a technician to reset the skyline cable in 2000, the BIWMP provided no monitoring or follow-up. Monthly reporting on financial transactions had already ceased, leaving the RUC institutionally weak. Soon other undesirable things started to happen. Rules and regulations made by the RUC were completely ignored. Not a single meeting was held in three years. The RUC chairperson arbitrarily reduced the transportation charge for milk from Rs 1 per litre to just Rs 0.50 and even as low as 0.25 without consulting the users or the other members of the RUC. The savings in the bank of about Rs 150,000 gradually shrank to about a hundred thousand, which was later given as an interest-free loan to the operators and the dudh thekedar.They did not pay it back and neither the BIWMP nor the new VDC chairperson took the trouble to follow up on these wrongdoings.

Because they were isolated by distance, the farmers of Ikudol were not part of any decision-making regarding the Milkway. Despite the repeated insistence of the cooperative at Bhattedanda that farmers of Ikudol send their milk to Chhabeli, they, assuming that it would be extended, kept using the Milkway. They organised several delegations to the BIWMP and put forward a request for an extension. However, since the extension did not come about, they began sending their milk to Chhabeli. If the Milkway had been extended to Majhkhanda, perhaps the institutional incentive to maintain it would have been sustained. This did not happen, though, and the Milkway became defunct in January 2001.9

MILKWAY RESURRECTED

On July 21, 2002, incessant rain and landslides damaged the road to Bhattedanda in several places. A large section of the road between Jhankridanda and Chhabeli collapsed. About 2,000 litres of milk a day could not be sold. Security forces opened the road to Tinpane on 25 July, but this did not help dairy farmers export milk.10 It was estimated that the road between Jhankridanda and Chhabeli would take five to six months and nearly three million rupees to repair and re-open. This road was not a priority for the government because floods and landslides had also affected other parts of the country, killing many and damaging vital road and bridges.11 There were no political representatives to put pressure on the government to allocate funds to repair the road to Bhattedanda.12

The livelihood of the farmers in Ikudol had improved substantially in five years. When the road collapsed, however, they lost access to the milk market and found themselves in a quandary. Their regular income from milk stopped but their expenses did not. They tried their best to cope. Some farmers from villages as far as Pokhari Chaur near Majhkhanda carried milk to Tinpane on foot. It took them more than five hours, by which time the milk had curdled. Some resorted to making khuwa. Although they were able to convert only about a fifth of the milk produced, they still sold about 60 kilogrammes of khuwa every day. Many others made ghiu. They were losing about 30-60 per cent of their daily income. As a result, they stopped importing animal feed, which they no longer needed to increase milk yields.

The farmers in Ikudol had already invested millions of rupees in purchasing high-yielding lahurebuffaloes, each of which cost between Rs 30,000 and 40,000. Between 2000 and 2001 they had taken a total of about 2.5 million rupees in loans to buy buffaloes. The interest was accumulating. They would not be able to repay their loans or interest on them by selling ghiu or khuwa, so they would have to sell their buffaloes to the momo (steamed dumplings filled with ground buffalo meat) market in Kathmandu for about Rs 10,000 each. Having to sell buffaloes for one-third to one-fourth of their purchase price would have been a disaster pushing dairy farmers into poverty.

Many years ago, in the village of Kharidanda in Bukhel, Lalitpur, a farmer explained a similar situation in his own way. A polythene pipe had been laid across a landslide to supply domestic water to about 50 households. Having water at their doorstep helped farmers to raise buffaloes and sell milk. Within three years, however, the polythene pipes had weathered and leaked in many places. Unless they were replaced before they snapped, farmers suspected that one day they would lose the milk business. One farmer said, ‘Sir harule aaj ta rasbari khanu bhaa chha, dudh bechna payena bhane momo khanu parlaa’ or ‘You have been eating rasbari (a popular mithaimade of milk), but if we fail to sell milk you will have to eat momo’. His argument had not struck me at that time but observing how the cloudburst in 2002 had devastated access to the market, the implication of what he meant hit me like a lightening bolt. If farmers in Ikudol failed to sell milk they would have to sell their buffaloes because they could not feed them to no purpose. Selling milk for rasbari meant a sustainable livelihood for farmers, but selling buffaloes for momo meant the liquidation of assets and the loss of livelihood.13

Behind every cloud, however, there is a silver lining. Sometimes a disaster can goad people into pursuing a collective endeavour which will protect their interests. The cloudburst of 21 July, 2002, seems to have done just that. All hope of the Milkway being repaired with government help had waned, but the farmers did not wait for an outside agency to help them. On 26 July, 2002, thedudh thekedar, the new chairperson of the dissolved VDC and a few Milkway users from Ikudol requested a BIWMP engineer who had been involved in the construction of the Milkway in 1995 and was still doing other work in the village, to help them re-operate the Milkway. Local politicians also made a similar request to the BIWMP through their respective channels.

It is worth mentioning that before the Milkway stopped operating, the users had, in early 2001, requested the BIWMP to fix the carrier and some pulleys. The BIWMP, presuming that this would be done while extending the Milkway to Ikudol—a development which never materialised—never made the repairs. After the cloudburst, the Milkway users did not expect the BIWMP’s help. They decided to use the Milkway’s own funds to fix the problems themselves and to restart the operation of the ropeway as quickly as possible.

The BIWMP engineer hired a skilled technician who had previously helped maintain the Milkway. Together with the users, they fixed the carrier, overhauled the generators, and re-tensioned the rope. The Milkway still had about Rs 70,000 which it had given to the dudh thekedar as an interest-free loan; about Rs 25,000 of it was spent on fixing the pulleys and the generator. The Milkway rolled again on August 10, when it began transporting rice and other goods. It began transporting milk when the road between Jhankridanda and Tinpane section opened on 16 August, 2002. The RUC was replaced with a temporary committee. A new charge of Rs 0.50 per kilogramme for goods was fixed. The Milkway carried between 700 and 900 litres of milk and 700 kilogrammes of other merchandise daily. As of July 15, 2004, a total of 1,046,294 kilogrammes had been hauled and a total of Rs 523,147 earned (Table 8.3). Of this amount, Rs 316,204 was spent on diesel and the salaries of the operators.

By securing access to the milk market, the Milkway had provided the villagers a sense of security and prevented them from growing poorer after the cloudburst of 2002. Because of this, they vowed that they would not abandon it in the future.

REFLECTING ON DEVELOPMENT POLITICS

The development path to Bhattedanda Milkway was not easy. First, bureaucrats, politicians and donors did not view the idea of a ropeway for transporting milk positively. Those in the corridors of power in Kathmandu were cynical, and, in the initial stages at least, most officials in the Department of Soil Conservation and Watershed Management (DSCWM) within which the BWP operated felt that the idea of a milkway was an

Source: Personal communication with Jagat Thing , who works as ropeway operator at Jhankridanda.

example of misplaced exuberance and, as a project, not viable.14 Though scepticism was dominant, the milkway proposal had some supporters in the government, too. Having seen small ropeways in the Alps transport farm produce, the EU’s counterpart in the BWP agreed to support the milkway, as did the EU representative in Kathmandu.

A new problem emerged after the project was approved and field implementation had begun: purchasing tailor-made equipment. EU rules only allowed the purchase of equipment from Europe or from countries receiving EU support. This required surmounting the hurdle of transferring funds from capital support to commodity aid. Furthermore, before approving the purchase, the EU asked that a report be submitted containing a detailed justification of the milkway, an economic analysis and a discussion of the choice of location, type of system, and so on. If this stipulation was not complied with, the EU indicated, any expenditure in relation to the construction of the ropeway would be frozen.

The BWP did not have such details to present, but it also could not stop the construction of the towers, which was already in progress. The construction work had to be completed by the end of the fiscal year, which was hardly two weeks away. Consequently, the BWP suggested that it would be a tragedy if the construction of the ropeway came to a halt because a few details were missing from its report.15 The EU conceded, and the Milkway came into existence. When it began operating in 1995, everyone who visited it opined that similar short-haul ropeways should be built in other parts of the country in order to increase access to remote mountain villages (see Box), but none of the views expressed were pursued to use stages of rethinking, planning or implementation.

Extending the Bhattedanda Milkway was to be a major activity of the BIWMP, which began in 1998. According to the Project newsletter Jaladhar (2001), fieldwork did not start until 2000, by which time the Milkway was running at a loss. The BIWMP had used the first two years for preparatory works16 as well as to prepare a proposal for a biodiversity project.17 Between 1999 and 2001, six consultants, including some expatriates, were separately hired to study and survey the ropeway alignment to Majhkhanda. Each recommended extending the Milkway.18 A detailed survey for the extension and a report on the MHP in Bhattedanda were completed.19 An expatriate consultant who visited Bhattedanda estimated that the extension to Majhkhanda would cost Rs 60 million. The estimate of a local company was, due to the difference in the systems proposed, just half of that. However, even the lower estimate of about Rs 30 million was higher than what had been allocated by the BIWMP and much higher than the amount spent on the Milkway.

Implementing the extension seemed more complex than expected for several reasons: there was no expertise available, it demanded more financial resources than allocated and there was no way to verify the costs estimated by the consultants. As a result, the proposal for an extension was gradually pushed aside as an alien activity outside the purview of watershed management proper. The BIWMP dropped the idea of extending the Milkway, but continued supporting the local people in their desire to build a road from Chhabeli to Bhattedanda and beyond. In most stretches the road had to be supported by retaining structures, for which the BIWMP provided gabion boxes. Because the cloudburst of 2002 caused widespread damage to the road, no vehicle ever plied it.

The pressure to extend the ropeway continued on the part of both the EU as well as the villagers of Majhkhanda. At this stage, the BIWMP sought the help of a suspension bridge expert. If Indian materials were used, the expert suggested, the cost could be lowered to about Rs 20 million. To sort out operational problems, the BIWMP studied the institutional arrangement of the Milkway. Within three months, two studies, both of which recommended a new organisational structure to manage the Milkway, including the proposed extension, had been completed.20 The Milkway stopped functioning in January 2001, six months after these two studies were completed. Six months after its closure, yet another study was undertaken to examine the reasons the existing users’ committee had failed to function.21

The operational problems highlighted in this report legitimised the postponement of the ropeway’s extension. In November 2001, in the third year of its implementation, the EU reviewed the progress of the BIWMP (MTR/BIWMP, 2001). The review mission was not impressed with the Milkway because it was not functioning. It recommended that an extension not be constructed if local people failed to re-operate the existing system within six months. Apparently, the mission blamed the villagers for the ropeway’s failure. The villagers, in turn, blamed the chair of the users’ committee. The BIWMP blamed the design of the system and the institutional arrangement set up for its operation.

The Milkway’s institutional ills were broadcast publicly. In November 2002, a daily newspaper reported that the Bhattedanda Milkway had not operated for many months. The villagers were fed up with the repeated assurances of BIWMP officers that the Milkway would be extended. The Nepali co-director of the BIWMP acknowledged that the extension had been delayed because the feasibility studies had not been completed. The newspaper reported the allegations of some villagers that the officers had come to the area only after the Milkway was built and that instead of extending it, they had squandered funds on unproductive activities.22

The EU, it was argued, had always wanted the extension to take place. When the EU saw no evidence that the Milkway was being extended, it decided to close the BIWMP in April 2003, the end of its five-year period. A new Nepali co-director, the third, was appointed just four months before the termination of the Project. Despite the limited time he had, he was eager to extend the BIWMP beyond April 2003 and continued to pursue the proposal to extend BIWMP at various levels.

In the meantime, Badri Narayan Basnyat, after being appointed the Minister of Forest and Soil Conservation, wrote to the EU headquarters in Brussels in February 2003 requesting that the BIWMP be extended. In his reply to the Minister, Christopher Patten, a member of the European Commission, wrote in March 2003 that the BIWMP could not be extended beyond April 2003. Patten hinted that the EU was disappointed that the Milkway had not been extended to promote agricultural activities in the five years from 1998 to 2003 but suggested that the EU would agree to consider the construction of new ropeways for poverty alleviation activities within the context of future cooperation.

EU funding ceased in April 2003, but HMG/N extended the BIWMP until July 15, 2004, on the grounds that the Milkway had to be extended and that the financial agreement was still valid until December 2003. The BIWMP (now supported only by HMG/N) requested the EU to support the extension of the Milkway. On 26 September, 2003, three months before the financial agreement of the BIWMP between HMG/N and the EU expired, Nepali news media, for the second time in eight years, published stories about how the Bhattedanda Milkway had helped to reduce poverty and preserve the environment.23 One newspaper said that the extension had been hampered because the BIWMP had closed in April.24

BACK TO THE BEGINNING

The above is a story about the drudgery in the lives of hills farmers and the politics of development. A variety of agricultural produce is grown at different altitudes in the mountains in Nepal but because there is no access to markets, such produce cannot be sold. Hence, many families who might otherwise have been innovative and entrepreneurial are not. Short-haul ropeways can help provide markets for goods and foster income generation. They can connect thousands of hill villages to roads and thereby improve access to markets.

Bringing about such a change is easier said than done because ropeway development is a multi-faceted task. Lessons at Bhattedanda throw light on some of these dimensions. The Bhattedanda Milkway was an innovation introduced to open a marginalised region of South Lalitpur with twin objectives. The first was to improve the economy by providing farmers with access to the milk market. The second objective was, by creating the incentive to sell milk, to get families to stop making khuwa and consequently to burn less firewood and minimise deforestation. It took four years for the idea to materialise although the Milkway itself was built in less than a year.

In addition to using the Milkway to transport milk, the villagers also used it to export vegetables, brooms, and even flowers on occasion. Cement, pipes, and corrugated zinc sheeting were imported to the villages. The Milkway introduced local changes; it earned money for its upkeep and rendered local operators capable of undertaking regular maintenance. These developments demonstrate that farmers are capable of making the best of a situation. A development-oriented welfare state should capitalise on such local initiatives.

In the end, however, the Milkway fell prey to conflicting interests. One interest group promoted the Kanti Rajpath, a highway which passed through Bhattedanda. It had been started about 40 years ago but never completed. No bridges or culverts were built and landslides had damaged the road in many sections. After the restoration of multi-party polity in 1990, the rehabilitation of this highway became a political ball game to woo voters. From 1994 onward the government allocated budget to rehabilitate the section of the road from Tinpane up to Chhabeli. The amount was used to dispense patronage to local contractors, villagers, politicians, truck owners and transport lobbies, but no serious action was taken to rehabilitate the road.

The continued operation of trucks created another disincentive for operating the ropeway. Milk contractors exercised their influence in order to promote transportation by trucks. For government officials, the Milkway was one of hundreds of development initiatives and meant very little after it was inaugurated. Bureaucrats had no incentive to analyse the contribution of the Milkway, which ushered in only micro-level benefits to the farmers of one region. Unlike the road, the Milkway met neither local nor national political-economic interests.

We, as outsiders and perhaps catalysts, had conceptualised the idea that a ropeway could be the solution to the villagers’ difficulty in selling milk. As a pilot activity, more attention was paid to the technical aspects of the ropeway than to its social and institutional dimensions. The Milkway project used development jargon like ‘community participation,’ ‘appropriate technology,’ and ‘government as facilitator,’ yet the process of building and operating it did not foster desirable changes in the beginning. Consequently, the Bhattedanda Milkway, like its predecessors, ended up being an agency-guided, donor-funded, target-bound, top-down activity. One major reason for the hiatus in the operation of the Milkway was the absence of a social carrier attuned to its ethos. Another problem was that the lag time between initial use in a pilot project and the widespread diffusion of a new technology is long, longer than most project log frames.

To assume that the users’ group would operate and manage a ropeway like a water supply system was unreasonable. The operation of a ropeway demands particular institutional practices to sustain its uninterrupted operation. That the operators and users lived in two different villages did not help to build a viable institution. Khuwa producers living in remote villages faced different problems and had different aspirations than the ropeway users’ committee and the operators did. A committee of users alone could not be formed, so a joint group with users and operators was made. Because their interests were different, however, only a few users ended up joining the RUC as members. Most members were operators and individuals from Bhattedanda.

Integrating the interests of the users and operators demanded continuous engagement with both groups, but this ceased after the Milkway began operating. Simply put, the operators in Bhattedanda had nothing to lose if the Milkway did not run. They had no incentive other than the wages they earned operating the Milkway and by engaging in other, related activities. The RUC was not able to play the role of a mediator in order to establish communications between the operators and the users. The DAO at least should have monitored the revenue collected—which was misused— but it did not. Perhaps the expectation that the DAO would assume this responsibility was unreasonable because it had so many other activities to oversee. As a result, problems among the committee members, the operators, and the dudh thekedar gradually escalated. Disputes could have been resolved had there been a set of rules for community-based transport systems but there was not. This is because transportation is regarded as the responsibility either of the government or of private businesses but not of a community. The political economy of the milk business did not allow users to make decisions about the mode of transportation used. In the end, the dudh thekedar made the decisions. Consequently, the Milkway did not operate and remained idle until landslides damaged the road from Chhabeli to Jhankridanda.

The Milkway began working anew because of this natural disaster: milk could not be exported and everyone lost. Attempts to transport milk manually did not work. Thousands of litres of milk curdled. The crisis stimulated those involved to work together despite their differences in order to get the Milkway operational. Without the support of outsiders, they repaired the Milkway and got it functioning. This process provides a key lesson: in response to collective constraints arising during times of crisis, individuals of a community put aside differences and engage in bringing forth both technical and social innovations.

In the end, all involved in the Bhattedanda Milkway found it inspiring. Some section of HMG/N did realise that the Milkway helped reduce poverty and protect the environment. Even villagers who refused to use the Milkway for over a year saw it as a bardan (boon). The EU as donor also saw the rich potential that lay in this approach for its future cooperation with Nepal. Though the lessons of Bhattedanda have yet to ignite a fresh development paradigm, those of us who were there in Chila in 1990 exploring measures to stabilise a landslide cannot but marvel at the serendipity that started it all.

NOTES

1 See DPTC (Undated).

2 The estimate of quantity of milk produced and marketed in South Lalitpur is based on personal communication with dudh thekedars. Also see Upadhya (2002).

3 These flowers fetch a high price in Kathmandu during festivals but are imported from Siliguri, India, despite their abundance right near Kathmandu.

4 The Milkway began operating in June 1995. At that stage baseline information was collected. This was compared with a second survey about two years later which also monitored impact of the Milkway. See BWP (1997).

5 The report (BWP/Himal Hydro Consult, 1996) says that the extension is not only feasible but also necessary to provide market access to thousands of families who live in remote parts of Lalitpur which no road will reach in the foreseeable future.

6 In 1995 BPC Hydro Consult conducted a feasibility study of the proposed Bhattedanda MHP for the BWP. The idea was to construct a MHP in Bhattedanda along with a ropeway to Majhkhanda.

7 On 18 and 25 June, 2004 Rastriya Bimarsha, a Nepali weekly, printed full-page investigative reports by Kedar Subedi that highlighted how the BIWMP’s fund had been misused. The weekly headline read ‘Ek Arab Bis Karod Ko Yojana: Dubne Ra Dubaune Kam’ (Deeds that destroyed a Rs 1,200­million project).

8 On 23 September, 2003 Rajdhani a daily Nepali newspaper, reported that some milk samples from the market showed that coliform was present but the report did not state to which dairy the samples belonged. They could have been from private dairies. Kantipur and other Nepali daily newspapers on 14 June, 2004, reported that 23 per cent of the samples of DC milk and 100 per cent of the milk samples of many private dairies showed presence of coliform bacteria.

9 The exact date is not known because no records are available.

10 The Maoist insurgency that began in 1996 had spread across many rural areas of Nepal. On 2 January, 1999, the Maoists killed two and injured four policemen stationed in Bhattedanda. Following this incident, the government put security forces in strategic locations such as Kotdanda near Tinpane to control the movements of the insurgents.

11 Floods and landslides affected 47 districts (40 of which were in the hills) and caused the deaths of 441 persons. The loss of property was estimated to be about 418.91 million rupees. For details, see HMG/N (2003).

12 All VDCs and DDCs were dissolved. Elections were not held due to security concerns. The Lower House of Parliament was dissolved.

13 Nepali law prohibits slaughtering female animals but female buffaloes are slaughtered in Kathmandu to make momo. Rasbari is considered a luxury. Thus, a milk market would decide not only the fate of a farmer tending buffaloes up in the hills but also who gets to eat what, momo or rasbari. Milk and momo also have distinct social implications. Milk can be produced sustainably without compromising assets (buffaloes) whereas making momo liquidates that same asset.

14 This initiative was labelled ‘nautanki’, or ‘comic street show’.

15 See BWP/IDC (1994).

16 According to Jaladhar (2001) no field activities were implemented in the first two years.

17 The EU was interested in supporting a watershed-based biodiversity project which would protect the core of the Phulchoki area. The BIWMP spent approximately Rs 10 million over three years to develop a biodiversity project proposal for a 27 million-Euro project. It was not clear which department within the Ministry of Forests and Soil Conservation would implement the project. The project did not materialise in the end.

18 Bechter (1999) found that it would be able to transport an additional 1000 litres of milk daily after the extension. The study also recommended establishing a chilling centre in Bhattedanda to cope with the additional milk supply of 2000 litres per day. The milk could then be transported in the afternoon, too.

19 Himal Hydro and General Construction Limited (1999) and BPC Hydroconsult (1999) prepared detailed surveys of a potential ropeway and carried out a feasibility for a MHP.

20 See BIWMP (2000a and 2000b).

21 See BIWMP (2001).

22 The Himalayan Times, 10 November, 2002.

23 In a news bulletin, Nepal Television reported that the installation of the Milkway in Bhattedanda, Lalitpur, had brought smiles to the faces of the local people. The Himalayan Times, an English daily, reported on September 26, 2003 that the Milkway served 265 families by carrying agricultural products worth 22 million rupees from the area each year. According to the daily, the national co-director of the BWP said, ‘We have even studied, designed and estimated the cost of an advanced Milkway. Hopefully, the EU will sanction the budget of 16 million rupees after November [2002]’.

24 Nepal Samacharpatra, 26 September, 2003.

REFERENCES

Bechter, E., 1999: Field Visit Report on Ropeway Extension from Bhattedanda to Majhkhanda and Pyutar, Bagmati Watershed Project, June, Kathmandu.

BIWMP, 2000a: Bhattedanda Ropeway Extension Organisational Development Study, Development Vision Nepal, Bagmati Integrated Watershed Management Programme, March, Kathmandu.

BIWMP, 2000b: Bhattedanda Ropeway Extension Organisational Development Study, Development Vision Nepal, Bagmati Integrated Watershed Management Programme, May, Kathmandu.

BIWMP, 2001: An Organisational Study on the Bhattedanda Ropeway Extension, Bagmati Integrated Watershed Management Programme, June Kathmandu.

BPC Hydroconsult, 1999: Proposed Bhattedanda Ropeway Extension Area: Milkway Extension and Power Supply, Field Visit Report, Kathmandu.

BWP, 1997: Post Investment Economic Analysis and Socio-economic Impact of the Conservation Ropeway, Report Number 5.26, Bagmati Watershed Project, Kathmandu.

BWP/Himal Hydro Consult, 1996: Field Report on Feasibility Study and Design for an Extension of the Bhattedanda Conservation Ropeway at Lalitpur District, Kathmandu.

BWP/IDC, 1994: BWP Follow-up Report on the Material Ropeway Bhattedanda-Jhankridanda, July, Heidelberg.

DPTC (Undated): A Case Study of Debris Flow in L-8 Branch of Nallu Khola on September 1981 by P. L. Rajbhandari, Water-induced Disaster Prevention Training Centre, subsequently upgraded to Department of Water-induced Disaster Prevention (DWIDP), Kathmandu.

Himal Hydro and General Construction Limited, 1999: Bhattedanda-Majhkhanda-Pyutar Ropeway: Detailed Survey Report.

HMG/N, 2003: Disaster Review 2002, Department of Water-induced Disaster Prevention (DWIDP), Ministry of Water Resources, Kathmandu.

Jaladhar, 2001: The Quarterly Newsletter of the BIWMP, No. 3, Bagmati Integrated Watershed Management Programme, Jan-Mar, Kathmandu.

MTR/BIWMP, 2001: Draft Mid-term Review Report, Mid-term Review Mission, Bagmati Integrated Watershed Management Programme, ALA/96/17, EU, Brussels.

Thapa, S., 2002: Environmental and Socio-economic Impact Assessment of Bhattedanda Ropeway, Masters Thesis, Department of Environmental Management, School of Environmental Management and Sustainable Development (SchEMS), Kathmandu.

Upadhya, M., 1993: The Economic and Environmental Considerations in the Preparation of Khuwa, A Milk Product: A Case Study Done in Ikudol VDC, Lalitpur District, Bagmati Watershed Project, Kathmandu.

Upadhya, M., 2002: Lalitpur’s White Gold, Nepali Times, 1-7, March, Kathmandu

Source: Ropeway in Nepal