ABSTRACT
The United Nations Development Programme published its first Human Development Report in 1990. Since then it has done one every year, each time taking a different and topical theme of global concern and setting out its analysis and its ideas on how best to move forward. The theme of its 2006 report was water crisis, and its analysis highlighted the challenges that are entailed in the efforts to provide safe drinking water, especially in the world’s developing countries. Ninety per cent of Nepalis, the report stated, have ‘sustainable access to an improved water source’ (UNDP 2006: 293). This is a remarkable achievement for one of the world’s poorest countries: a country, moreover, that was at that time going through a major transition in its political structure (see Chapter 4). And the achievement becomes even more remarkable when you consider that Nepal only really started its efforts to provide drinking water in the mid-1970s, just a few years before the start of the International Decade for Drinking Water Supply and Sanitation.1 A few months after UNDP’s water report, Nepal’s bi-weekly magazine Himal Khabar Patrika reported that only 52 per cent of the population had access to drinking water supply, adding that this was the high estimate.
