“<\/em>Dozer road building usually comes along with a near-total absence of proper drainage, haphazard destruction of wide swathes of vegetation, and reckless downhill soil dumping. This is a human and environmental disaster underway in plain sight. The current upward trend in dozer road building across the country indicates the steady, if not exponential, growth of this disaster.”<\/em><\/p>\n The same article describes the conundrum:<\/p>\n “Road building is now ubiquitous across Nepal, from Kathmandu to the most remote corners of the country. Every Nepali deserves access to a road and the vital services that come with it: education, medicine, access to new markets, and easy transport to urban centres. Road building and maintenance bring paid work, especially needed in remote communities. Nobody would argue against the importance of these outcomes.<\/em><\/p>\n “But roads aren\u2019t the development cure-all that many pretend they are. Just as ubiquitous as road building in Nepal is the destruction that accompanies it: if you\u2019re travelling in the hills and want to find a road, just look for the landslides. The vast majority of Nepal\u2019s local road network is cut haphazardly into steep hillsides with little or no planning, triggering landslides and washing massive amounts of soil into rivers.”<\/em><\/p>\n The practice of dozer road building is widespread and massively destructive.\u00a0 Astonishingly, the article notes that “f<\/em>rom 1998 to 2016, the length of Nepal\u2019s road network multiplied by a factor of 11<\/em>“.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, The Kathmandu Post describes the effects of this blizzard of road building<\/a> in one district, Baglung:-<\/p>\n “In Baglung Municipality too roads get swept away every year by landslides. Gyanendra Gautam, ward chairman of Baglung Ward No 11, said that most of the rural roads have been swept away by landslides in this monsoon. \u201cForget vehicles, even people can\u2019t walk through these rural roads,\u201d said Gautam.”<\/em><\/p>\n I have written previously about the disastrous effects of these dozer roads in Nepal<\/a>.\u00a0 The Google Earth image below, from Badigad in Nepal, shows the scale of the problem:-<\/p>\n A Google Earth image from Badigad in Baglung, Nepal, showing the scale of landslides associated with Dozer roads<\/p><\/div>\n .<\/p>\n This pattern is repeated endlessly across the Hill Districts of Nepal, and the problem is getting worse, quickly.\u00a0 The irony is of course that in many cases, the local population ends up being worse off a few years after the road has been built.\u00a0 As Dale Carson writes<\/a>:<\/p>\n “Roads and the services they provide are needed. But the current trajectory of road building trades short-term benefits for widespread long-term problems. And, like many disasters, these will be driven by the actions of the wealthy and powerful few to the detriment of the many.”<\/em><\/p>\n This is an avoidable environmental and human tragedy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Two articles published in Nepali newspapers in the last few days have examined the disastrous impacts of dozer roads in mountain areas<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":32036,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_members_access_role":[],"_members_access_error":""},"categories":[740],"tags":[212,103,66,27,72],"class_list":["post-32031","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-landslide-costs","tag-construction","tag-highway","tag-nepal","tag-road","tag-south-asia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32031","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32031"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32031\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32036"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32031"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32031"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32031"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Dozer](\"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/files\/2019\/09\/19_09-Nepal-1-e1567489045355.jpg\")