When he was a young farmer, Chandra Bir Kumal, a resident of Gobardiya village in Dang district, never had to rely on water stored in artificial reservoirs for rice plantation. He always used fresh water freely flowing through local streams.

“I do not know whether fresh water is better than stagnant water,” says Chandra Bir. “But, when I was active in farming, I never had to look for alternatives. I used to get a plenty of rainwater.”

Affectionately called by the local folks as Thula Ba (or the eldest villager), Chandra Bir is one of the first Kumals who settled in Banmari area of Gobardiya village. Later, many other Kumals, one of Nepal’s minority indigenous communities, settled down there. Today, the whole Banmari area is known as Kumal Gaun.

Combating climate change through forest conservation

When he was a young farmer, Chandra Bir Kumal, a resident of Gobardiya village in Dang district, never had to rely on water stored in artificial reservoirs for rice plantation. He always used fresh water freely flowing through local streams.

“I do not know whether fresh water is better than stagnant water,” says Chandra Bir. “But, when I was active in farming, I never had to look for alternatives. I used to get a plenty of rainwater.”

Affectionately called by the local folks as Thula Ba (or the eldest villager), Chandra Bir is one of the first Kumals who settled in Banmari area of Gobardiya village. Later, many other Kumals, one of Nepal’s minority indigenous communities, settled down there. Today, the whole Banmari area is known as Kumal Gaun.

Nearly five decades ago, when Chandra Bir and a few other Kumal families started living in Banmara, chopping trees and fighting malaria, they did not have irrigation facilities. All they had was rainwater. And it was sufficient and reliable. “We did not need water reservoirs,” says he. “We did not even think of building them.”

However, as years passed by, rains started to get erratic. It became increasingly difficult to predict when monsoon would start and end. “It was not like this when I was young,” says Chandra Bir. “Then, the monsoon would normally start and end around the same time.”

As Chandra Bir aged and became too weak to work, his son Kalpa Ram, shouldered the burden of cultivating their eight kattha of farm land. But unlike in the time of his father, Kalpa Ram, now 50-year-old, did not find it easy to irrigate their farm land with rainwater. “If the monsoon arrives early this year, it gets late the next year,” says Kalpa Ram. “Rains are no longer predictable, no longer reliable.”

Fortunately, Kalpa Ram no longer needs to depend on just rainwater. He gets water supply for irrigation from a local pond. Built by a local Community Forest Users’ Group (CFUG), of which Kampa Ram is a member, this pond regularly supplies water to more than 200 families of Gobardiya village. “If this pond was not built, we all would have to leave this village a long ago,” says Kalpa Ram.

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