Nepal’s mountains have been witnessing a disastrous road construction frenzy over the past few decades. Poorly engineered roads carved with bulldozers are ravaging the fragile landform, imperiling existing infrastructure and settlements, and endangering lives in the Himalayas. Uncoordinated infrastructural development by different actors is a systemic problem exemplified in the ‘bulldozer model’ of road expansion now characteristic of Nepal's rural development.
In July 2024, 62 passengers lost their lives when debris flow swept two buses off the Narayanghat-Muglin road (National Highway 44) into the Trishuli River at Simaltal, Chitwan in central Nepal. In October 2021, widespread flooding and landslides claimed six lives, displaced 185 families, and damaged about 100 hectares of land affecting over 600 families in Khaptadchhanna Rural Municipality, Bajhang in farwestern Nepal. All of these incidents have link to the phenomenon of unsustainable road constructions that exacerbated rain-induced calamities. At Simaltal, unmanaged spoil and debris from the Simaltal-Bangesal-Dumregaon road being expanded by the Bharatpur Metropolitan City resulted in the debris flow to the highway downslope. In Bajhang, unprecedented damages across 12 rural municipalities were reported from areas with indiscriminate road construction while Saipal Rural Municipality, untouched by any road construction, was spared from the devastation.
A newly excavated road runs along the Thuli Bheri river valley near Juphal Airport in Dolpa, Karnali Province (Photo by the author, September 2021)
Ongoing works in a road track constructed in Jagdulla Rural Municipality, Dolpa (Photo by the author, December 2020)
Small landslides originating from road tracks have triggered large debris slides and slope failures elsewhere in Nepal. Of the 337 landslides visible on Google Earth in the hill districts as of 2020, 60% were near roads and 53% had occurred after road construction. While this association is somewhat known, to remedy the expansive devastation in Nepal’s mountains caused by roads, the politico-economic drivers of this maladaptive ‘development’ should be investigated.
New-found Power and Unprecedented Construction
Nepal adopted a federal governance in 2017 following the promulgation of a new constitution in 2015. The administrative restructuring consolidated the 3374 existing administrative units (217 municipalities each with 9-35 wards and 3157 Village Development Committees i.e. VDCs with 9 wards each) to 753 local governments (293 municipalities and 460 rural municipalities) with a total of 6743 wards.
Practically, this converted many of the former VDCs in the rural mountains into wards of the local governments, in effect, enlarging the functional units of administration. The provincial and the local governments, eager to test their new-found power and resources, rapidly expanded the local roads to connect the scattered mountain settlements that were previously served by the former VDCs’ ward offices with the now-distant centres of rural municipalities.
Between 1998 and 2016, the local road network (LRN) was expanded from 4780 km to 57632 km – a 1200% growth while the strategic road network (SRN) comprising national highways and feeder roads, saw a modest growth from 4700 km to 15000 km. Furthermore, the construction of local/rural roads outpaced that of the strategic roads by about 10000 km between 2015 and early 2023.
The trend in road expansion by the federal government of Nepal 2015 onwards. Note the steady growth in the length of black-topped roads. Source: Ministry of Physical Infrastructure and Transport, 2021 and 2023. *Till mid-March 2023
Road expansion by the provincial and the local governments demonstrates a rapid growth in the length of earthen roads. Source: Ministry of Federal Affairs and General Administration, 2021; Ministry of Urban Development, 2023. *Till mid-March 2023
Local roads are being rapidly constructed in the hilly and mountain regions and they make up 45-65% of the roads recently built by provincial and local governments in five provinces except for Sudurpaschim and Lumbini provinces. In Sudurpaschim Province alone, 66 local governments built around 6000 kilometers of road tracks between 2016 and 2018, with some local governments spending up to 80% of their development budget on roads that are mostly not ‘vehicle-worthy’.
Dozer Development/Terror
Experts have long called out the ‘bulldozer development’ phenomenon – roads in mountains are constructed by local government or communities with limited resources, with indiscriminate use of bulldozers, and often without proper design, environmental assessment, or mitigation measures such as bioengineering.
Such constructions are often hastily expedited at the behest of local politicians trying to appease voters as local infrastructural needs supersede broader political and policy priorities. This is also fueled by a nexus between local politicians and contractors for the lion's share of the local infrastructure budget. Local politicians and elected local government officials reportedly benefit from or own construction businesses as they, in effect, award the local construction tenders to themselves or their cronies.
Precarious road track winds uphill from the town of Dunai located by the Thuli Bheri river. Dunai is the district headquarters of Dolpa which is located in a rain shadow in the trans-Himalayan region (Photos by the author, December 2020)
Local roads, which are mostly low-cost earthen roads, result in disproportionately large environmental impacts given their rapid and widespread excavation but much slower upgrading compared to the new roads built by the federal government. With the fiscal allocations for a local government scattered across sectoral and geographic priorities, there is barely enough budget to complete a road project in a year. Road tracks are generally excavated without proper grading and drainage, just before the end of the fiscal year, to be washed out within months by monsoon rains which are then reworked, upgraded, or completed in the subsequent dry seasons if not completely abandoned. Years of cyclical construction, damage, and re-construction before the cut sections finally stabilize following a complete clearance of loose earth leads to project period extensions and cost escalations while the environmental devastation and local hardships continue. But this model has incentives for the politico-economic nexus as the contractors get perennial projects. Occasional local protests, which take forms as creative as symbolic plantation of paddy on the muddy roads, are pacified by promises for better, all-weather roads in re-election bids.
The ‘bulldozer terror(ism)’ as prominent analyst and academic Dipak Gyawali puts it, is evident from the fact that Nepal, with the highest sales of excavators and bulldozers in South Asia around 2017 and 2018 , has become a lucrative market for heavy earth-moving equipment. The total number of registered bulldozers in Nepal almost doubled between 2010 and 2017/2018, with the first election for local governments conducted in 2017. Numerous local governments have reportedly purchased bulldozers for local road construction. At least 300 heads of local governments elected in 2017 were affiliated with the Federation of Contractors’ Associations of Nepal and owned construction firms or construction equipment that they rent out at exorbitant fares.
The soaring sales of earth-moving machinery in Nepal are evident in the rising number of new registrations of dozers, excavators, cranes, and trucks per year. Note the dip in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic and an immediate rebound in 2021 and 2022. Source: Department of Transport Management, Nepal in Data
The politico-economic nexus was already thriving before 2017. An interim arrangement called the ‘all-party mechanism’ comprising local political appointees enabled rural road and infrastructure construction; this setup, in the lack of regulatory oversight, was ripe for undue political influences in development budget allocation. The situation worsened after 2017 as many of the local politicians and their cronies who had thus amassed political and financial capital, mostly from construction contracts contested in the increasingly expensive elections.
Other individual and local interests are also at play. Politically connected and wealthy individuals desiring hefty compensation for their land acquired for roads or inflation of the value of their land adjacent to roads attempt to persuade dozer operators, engineers, and local decision-makers to adjust road alignment. Anecdotal accounts of local contractors colluding with local government appointees and executives of community forest users’ groups to clear stands of community-stewarded forests for timber under the pretext of road construction are also heard.
Unrestrained Construction Continues
Given a much more expansive and rapidly growing network of local roads and the array of authorities responsible for their jurisdiction, local and rural roads are less amenable to harmonized development, regulation, and the implementation of environmental and social safeguards. The Department of Roads (DoR), the federal agency overseeing the highway and feeder roads has division offices around the country and is well-staffed with around 450 engineers. Meanwhile, agencies governing local roads such as the Department of Local Infrastructure (DoLI) lack geotechnical engineers and geologists. Although DoLI’s rural road safety standards and guidelines have prescriptions for improving road design and slope stability, the provinces and the local governments lack the capacity, if not the will, to ensure compliance in rural road engineering. As local governments and actors in informal road building are disregarding legally mandated environmental assessment requirements viz. Brief Environmental Studies (BES) or Initial Environmental Examination (IEE) or Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), a departure from the environmentally disastrous road construction spree that incentivizes local politico-economic gains looks distant.
The terrace-covered hilly landscape of Roshi Khola area in Kavre, Bagmati Province in Central Nepal (top photo) and hikers walking down a new road track excavated over a foot trail in the same area (Photos by author, November 2017). Roshi Khola basin has been seeing rapid road construction, partly to cater to the rock quarries, including those owned by elected representatives of local governments. The area suffered intense devastation from floods and landslides during heavy rains on 26-28 September 2024 which has been attributed to unplanned quarrying from hill slopes.
The motivation behind this self-destructive development is understood. However, more research is still needed to quantify the ecological and socio-economic costs of the disastrous road building. More importantly, existing policy recommendations, engineering standards, and technical guidance should be heeded by decision-makers. For instance, DoLI’s experience in local infrastructure building is transferable to the provincial and the local governments.
The state’s apathy towards the devastating persistence of this failed and destructive development planning and the lack of commitment to save preventable loss of lives is appalling – it continues to ignore the warning calls of this socio-political and environmental mayhem. Public outcry in response to frequent road mishaps, some of which have claimed the lives of the local decision-makers who expedited the construction of unplanned roads themselves, is yet to actuate a stern government action. The exacerbating situation demands a wider reckoning on the part of political leadership and immediate action in the form of a systematic and national-scale policy intervention to break away from this criminal development trend.
Environment