Just before midnight on 3 November 2023, a 6.4-magnitude earthquake shook Nepal's Karnali Province, striking Jajarkot and Rukum West. It was the country's deadliest earthquake since 2015, killing more than 150 people and damaging over 62,000 homes. Then came the floods. Months later, flash floods tore through the same hillsides, sweeping away irrigation canals, farmland and homes, a reminder that disasters rarely arrive alone. What was at stake was not only lives and property but something harder to see: years of development progress that a single season can undo.
In Ranikhet, a village in Nalgad Municipality, the loss came down to a single piece of infrastructure. An unassuming irrigation canal did triple duty: it watered the fields, drove a micro-hydropower plant, and turned two traditional water mills. When critical sections were destroyed, farms dried up, the electricity went out, and families walked long distances to mill grain, returning to villages that sat in darkness for months.
"This canal is the heart of our community," recalls Bhim Bahadur Oli, a local farmer. "When it was washed away by floods, milling, electricity, and daily life was affected. Restoring it has helped us recover in so many ways."
In Bhalma Sota, in Aathbiskot Municipality, a canal that once irrigated 10 hectares and served 82 households was patched again and again, but the steep, unstable terrain undid every repair. For Rabi Babal Magar, a mother raising two children while her husband works abroad, the canal was a lifeline, all the more so after the earthquake damaged her home.
"When the canal was damaged at a critical point on the steep hills, I often had to depend on others to bring water to my fields," she says. "Sometimes no one could help me, and my crops dried up. Now I feel confident that I can irrigate my fields without depending on anyone."
In Kafalchaur, a third restored canal has brought life back to 47 households, watering fields and powering mills that grind grain and press mustard oil for villages well beyond its banks. Kali Bahadur Malla, who runs one of those mills, says the restored system has revived his family's livelihood, sparing his neighbours a long, expensive journey elsewhere.
Recovery, done well, is not merely restoration. Women worked on the crews that rebuilt the canals, quietly unsettling old assumptions about who builds what in these hills.
The canals are part of a wider recovery effort, funded by the Government of Japan, that has restored 45 facilities in the two districts, including irrigation systems re-engineered to withstand future floods. The logic is simple: build back not what was, but what can withstand what comes next.
What has been restored, beyond the infrastructure, is harder to quantify: hope, dignity, the confidence to plant again. Each monsoon still brings fresh risk to these hillsides, and resilient infrastructure remains the exception, not the rule. But the water flowing through Ranikhet, Bhalma Sota and Kafalchaur shows that even Nepal's most remote province can emerge from disaster stronger than before.
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