With just an irrigation system, a total of 600 ropanis of land is expected to be irrigated, benefitting 150 households, including 65 Dalit households.
Nada VDC, one of the most remote areas of Achham District (HDI 0.378), is home to 2,848 people. With its rugged mountain topography and scarce agricultural land, the area’s continual challenge is to balance the demands of its rising populations by sustainably using its limited natural resources in the face of a changing climate. Nada is one of the highly vulnerable areas in terms of disasters such as landslides and soil erosion. Its remoteness is another big challenge -- it is almost 16 miles away from the district headquarters of Mangalsen, and the people’s drudgery is associated with a lack of development infrastructures, including good roads, electricity, and irrigation. On top of it, the people have no easy access to water for both drinking and irrigation.
Only last year, with technical and financial support from UNDP’s Nepal Climate Change Support Program (NCCSP), a project funded by UK aid, residents of wards three, six, and seven of the VDC constructed an irrigation canal that channels water from the nearby Ruda river. This canal is expected to help locals become self-reliant for food, as they face many difficulties in importing food and other daily necessities from Mangalsen due to a lack of transport infrastructure. With increasing dry spells and droughts, their own agricultural produce hardly lasts three to six months.
The new irrigation canal has made life easier for Nada locals, as they are experiencing positive changes in the ways they farm. They have seen increased opportunities for entrepreneurship and other activities. With just an irrigation system, a total of 600 ropanis of land is expected to be irrigated, benefitting 150 households, including 65 Dalit households. Basundhara Devi Shahi, 65, said, “Before, we were totally dependent on rainwater to irrigate our lands. We had to leave our land barren in the absence of rain. But now, we don’t have to depend on rain or imported food items.”
The irrigation project is part of NCCSP’s efforts to help communities adapt to the effects of climate change. NCCSP is among the first few government-led initiatives to implement Nepal’s National Adaptation Programme of Action (NAPA), which seeks, among other things, to promote community-based adaptation through integrated management of agriculture, water, forest, and biodiversity. Since its inception in 2013, the project has helped implement 649 Local Adaptation Plans of Actions, benefitting 55,535 people, of whom 29,681 (53 percent) were women.