Back to news
31 Jul 2015 | News

Hope for Kyaung Taung’s water woes

1 min Read

70% Complete

The village of Kyaung Taung in the Inle Lake area in Myanmar sits atop a hill overlooking Heho city. And this hamlet with 80 households has a problem: it is plagued by severe water shortage. The woes of Kyaung Taung do not end here. The village wears a bald look, having lost all its forests.

However, these are not new stories.

Farmer U Nyein Kyaw, 57, recalls people facing severe water shortage in the village ever since he was 20 years old. “Even then people spent hours every day fetching water from Nyaung Kya pond during the dry season,” he says.

According to a village baseline report, Kyuang Taung receives one of the lowest rainfalls in the whole of southern Shan State. And the bad news is that this is declining every year.  Some farmers say the water in Nyaung Kya pond is also decreasing by the year.

Farmers attribute water scarcity in Kyaung Taung to increasing population growth and denuded forests. They say many organizations helped them find solutions but none have had lasting results.

According to U Nyein Kyaw, twenty years ago, UNDP supported the village build community tanks. Similarly, the Inle Literature, Culture and Development Association (ILCDA) with UNDP Inle Lake Conservation and Rehabilitation Project provided water tanks and filters in 2012. Today, two new community tanks to harvest rainwater are under construction with support from the EU-funded Himalica Initiative.

It was observed that some tanks require major repairs. If old tanks are repaired and the new ones get running, Kyaung Taung probably would have solved its water problem.

However, U Nyein Kyaw says repairing old tanks and building new ones alone will not solve the problem. “We need to operate the system efficiently,” he says. “And that’s what we didn’t have in the past.”

Now that the village has a permanent water user committee formed early this year, there are hopes that Kyaung Taung will finally have effective water governance. While there is no single model of effective water governance, a system must fit environmental, cultural, social, and economic contexts of the place.

Stay current

Stay up to date on what’s happening around the HKH with our most recent publications and find out how you can help by subscribing to our mailing list.

Sign Up

Related Contents

Continue exploring this topic

30 Jul 2015 Water
Deepening spring hydrogeology knowledge

The International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) in collaboration with theAdvanced Centre on Water Resources Development and Management (ACWADAM), ...

14 Oct 2015 News
Expedition to Rikha Samba Glacier in Nepal

The International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) and its partners for the ...

8 Apr 2016 News
38 Open Access Papers on Glaciology in High Mountain Asia

A special thematic issue of the Annals of Glaciology has recently been published by Cambridge University Press (link). The thirty-eight ...

High Yielding Variety of Oat Grass to Address Fodder Crisis in the Kangchenjunga Landscape, Bhutan

The Kangchenjunga Landscape Conservation and Development Initiative (KLCDI) is a transboundary initiative which covers an area of 25,085.8 square kilometres, ...

25 Mar 2015 News
Training on Reframing Leadership for Women and Men for Gender Equality

The purpose of the training was to increase gender transformative impacts in the HKH ...

1 Sep 2017 News
Hands-on Training on Water Harvesting Technology, Bio-intensive Agriculture Farming System, and Enclosed Compositing

Water Harvesting Pond: Water harvesting ponds allow users to collect, store, and use run-off from available sources of water to ...

Participation in sixth Regional Conservation Forum meeting in Bangkok

The Sixth Regional Conservation Forum (RCF ), organised by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Asia Office, the Ministry of Natural Resources ...

19 Jun 2018 Cryosphere
Geodetic training for Cryosphere Monitoring Programme in Bhutan

According to Tshering Tashi, Senior Hydromet Officer at Bhutan’s National Center of Hydrology and Meteorology (NCHM), Bhutan has very little ...