Rautahat and Parsa: Teja Mukhiya sits alone on the edge of his rice field, legs dangling above the cracked earth. The 25 year old farmer from Sonarniya village in Rautahat district stares at the rice plants he planted ten days ago. The tips are already turning yellow. The soil beneath is splitting open.
“Sab Sukha Par Ba (all has dried up),” he says in Bhojpuri. “If the rain doesn’t come, what will be left to harvest?”
Mukhiya’s fears are being echoed across Madhesh Province, the fertile flatlands stretching along the Indian border. Once known as granary of Nepal, Terai is now in the grip of an unprecedented water crisis that is leaving taps dry, wells empty, and fields barren.
For the third consecutive year, erratic monsoon rains and plunging groundwater levels have converged to paralyse both urban and rural life. But as the situation grows increasingly desperate, experts warn this is no seasonal anomaly, it’s a full-blown ecological emergency, long ignored and worsened by years of environmental mismanagement.
“We had never imagined this”
In Birgunj, the bustling commercial hub of southern Nepal, Pintu Srivastava never imagined the handpump he had installed seven years ago, drilled 260 feet into the ground, would one day stop working.
“Now, we get drinking water from my son’s school,” he says. “Even showering is a luxury, I haven’t poured water over myself in two days.”
Tankers deliver water sporadically. Srivastava collects a few buckets to bath and wash clothes, rationing every drop. When rainfall did come, a brief shower one afternoon, it brought only momentary relief from the heat, not the water shortage.
Mayor Rajeshman Singh of Birgunj confirms the scale of the crisis. “The city needs 25 million litres of water every day,” he says. “But even with our tankers and the national water supply system, we can’t meet the demand.”
The Nepal Water Supply Corporation provides 17 million litres a day. An additional 450,000 litres are distributed via tankers from the city and the army. Still, it’s not enough. Many neighbourhoods like Srivastava’s are going weeks without water.
Just 10 kilometres away, in the same city’s Ward 24, farmer Dilip Yadav says his entire neighbourhood has no access to municipal pipelines or functioning borewells. “It’s been over a month since our pump stopped bringing up water,” he says. “We only survive when the army brings tankers.”
“We saw the signs. No one listened.”
Rakesh Shah, head of Birgunj’s environment division, has tracked the slow collapse of the region’s water system. While completing his master’s thesis on handpumps at Pulchowk Engineering Campus in Kathmandu, he studied water levels across Madhesh Province.
“In 2022, water could be found at 20 feet in Ward 10,” he says. “By 2023, it had dropped to 30 feet. This year, it’s 35 feet. Below that, handpumps stop working.”
Shah isn’t alone in raising alarm. Locals like Yuvraj Chaurasiya recall when water “used to be everywhere.” Now, he says, “two buckets is all we can get, to either bathe or do laundry.”
But these are not isolated cases. The pattern is systemic. Groundwater depletion has accelerated across the entire Terai region, mostly in urbanising corridors like Birgunj.
The vice-chancellor of Madhesh University, Deepak Shakya, has watched the disaster unfold slowly for decades.
“In my childhood days, water used to come at 20 feet. Then we drilled deeper, 100ft, 200ft, even 300. Still, water has stopped coming,” he says. “The signs were there, but we didn’t pay attention. Now we are paying the price.”
Chure hills stripped bare and so is the aquifer
So where did all the water go?
Shakya blames the unchecked extraction of sand, gravel, and boulders from the Chure hills, the low lying range that plays a critical role in recharging groundwater across the plains.
“The slogan was to protect Chure,” he says. “But in reality, it became a stone quarry. Now go to any river, you won’t see a single boulder.”
Satellite images show that forests in Chure and adjoining foothills have been replaced by concrete settlements, commercial mining sites, and roadways. With the natural recharge zones stripped away, monsoon rains no longer seep into the aquifer but instead run off or evaporate.
Dipak Tiwari, a resident of Birgunj 18, offers a stark example. “Recently, someone dug 80 feet for a foundation and found nothing but dry sand. This wasn’t even farmland, just a residential plot.”
The consequences are now being felt across rural Nepal, where even rain-fed agriculture can no longer survive.
“No water, no rice, what will we eat?”
Back in Rautahat, just east of Parsa, 27-year-old farmer Brij Kishor Shah surveys his empty fields. “This year, only 70% of the rice planting is done,” he says. “By now, everything should’ve been green. Instead, it’s yellow or barren.”
In a normal year, rice is planted across 39,000 hectares in Parsa district. This year, it’s just 32,000, and even that is at risk.
“We sprayed medicine, spent 10,000 rupees to save the plants,” says Shah. “But it didn’t work. Even the borewells have failed, we checked up to 150 meters.”
Most farmers can’t afford electric pumps or private tankers. Even when they can, electricity is unreliable and expensive. In many villages, 11,000-volt transmission lines run above the fields, but two-phase connections for irrigation have never been installed.
“What good are the poles without current?” asks Atmananda Upadhyay, a former ward chair. “No water means not just crop loss but more loans, more debt.”
A single failed harvest can push farmers into poverty for years. “It’s not just one season,” says Upadhyay. “It means no food, no income, and rising loans for the next two or three years.”
Fish farming, too, is drying up
For Bigu Mukhiya, the drought has taken a different toll. Last year, he leased two bighas of ponds for fish farming in Rautahat, paying 166,000 rupees annually. Now, the ponds have dried up.
“The baby fish are barely alive in one corner where I’ve stored a little water,” he says. “If electricity goes for two hours, they’ll all die.”
There is electricity, but the voltage is too low. “I’ve invested half a million rupees,” he says. “If I lose the fish, I’m finished.”
Mukhiya’s story is not unique. Across Madhesh, farmers are running out of coping strategies. Borrowing more to plant again is risky. Waiting for rain is futile. And government support, they say, is either absent or too late.
“This is the constituency of former minister Prabhu Sah,” one local farmer notes bitterly. “His wife is the mayor. But we have no water.”
This is not just a weather problem, it’s a governance one
Experts agree that climate change is making rainfall more erratic. But they also stress that poor planning, decades of neglect and corruption have turned a natural challenge into a human made disaster.
“Climate change is real,” says Shah, Birgunj’s environment chief. “But the real problem is our broken recharge system. Even when it rains, it doesn’t soak the land like before.”
Experts warn, without urgent long term planning, the Terai could face irreversible ecological collapse.
Experts and locals demand expansion of irrigation infrastructure and installation of power lines to support electric pumps. They say protection of Chure and hill recharge zones, pond construction and rainwater harvesting systems and crop diversification and climate adaptive farming are also most essential things.
“If we don’t act now,” says Tiwari, “this will go beyond a water crisis. It will become a food crisis.”
Back in Sonarniya, Teja Mukhiya runs his fingers through the brittle rice plants. “I don’t know what we’ll eat this year,” he says quietly. “And next year? Who knows?”
For now, all he can do is wait. Wait for rain. Wait for relief. Wait for someone to take the crisis seriously.
But for farmers across the Terai, time, like water, is running out.
