Image credit: Gaurav Dhwaj Khadka
On most days after school, I crossed the Bagmati River in the backseat of a tempo, stuck in Kathmandu’s traffic. The bridge near the Balkhu junction was our checkpoint. As vehicles crawled forward, the scent announced our location before any signboard did. It was a stench we knew intimately: Bagmati’s own calling card. To cope, my schoolmates and I invented a game: whoever held their breath the longest while crossing the river won. That was over fifteen years ago. The game remains playable.
The Bagmati today is a drainage canal. Its once-sacred waters, which meander past the Pashupatinath temple and slice through the capital, have become repositories for garbage, sewage and collective apathy. Decades ago my grandparents remember swimming in its currents. Now few would risk dipping a toe.
Successive governments have deployed cleanup campaigns; planted floating barriers; and commissioned wastewater treatment plants. None has done much to rescue the river from indignity. The Bagmati remains unsmellable and fundamentally unloved.
Perhaps it is time to change tack. Rather than treating the Bagmati as a failed infrastructure project, what if we treated it as a legal entity, a bearer of rights?
The notion is not fanciful. In 2017 New Zealand passed a landmark law recognising the Whanganui River as a living being with its own legal personality. Two guardians—one appointed by the state, the other by the local Māori iwi (tribe)—speak on its behalf. The river is now protected not merely as a watercourse but as an ancestor. Legal personhood has shifted how New Zealanders relate to the Whanganui: from a resource to be managed to a relative to be respected.
Ecuador enshrined the rights of nature in its constitution as early as 2008. Bolivia followed suit with the Law of Mother Earth. Courts in Colombia and India have handed similar rights to rivers. Even municipalities in America have experimented with the concept. What all those efforts share is a recognition that environmental protection tends to fail because ecosystems have no standing in court. Giving nature legal rights changes that equation.
The Bagmati might benefit from a similar transformation. Legal recognition would allow the river to be defended against polluters and encroachers. It would force public authorities to treat the river as a legal stakeholder rather than as a water sink. It would compel developers to negotiate not only with landowners and ministries but also with a waterway that, on paper at least, has interests of its own.
True, implementation would be messy. The Bagmati traverses dozens of municipalities and communities, each with its own priorities and politics. Identifying guardians to speak for the river—whether they be bureaucrats, priests or civic groups—would require delicate balancing. Enforcement mechanisms would need real funding as well as legal teeth and political backing. And questions would remain about how to square the river’s rights with its many uses: religious, domestic, agricultural and industrial.
There would also be inevitable clashes with economic ambitions. How would a rights-bearing river respond to new flyovers, real-estate developments or hydropower dams? What legal precedents would be set if a river sued a government ministry or vice versa? Could a sacred river block a road project? Or demand compensation for decades of abuse?
Those are not trivial worries. But they are the right ones to ask. Nepal has historically relied on symbolism to sustain its environmental conscience: rituals at temples, slogans on Environment Day, photo-ops at river cleanups. Legal rights for the Bagmati would signal a pivot from performance to accountability. It would move the conversation from charity to justice.
Some might object granting rights to a river is anthropomorphic folly. But the folly is in assuming our laws serve only human ends. The air we breathe, the water we drink and the land we inhabit are not passive backdrops. They are active participants in our survival. Legal personhood may be a legal fiction but so, too, are corporations and governments. And they all enjoy rights.
The Bagmati deserves better than what we have given it: a daily diet of sewage and neglect. My hope is schoolchildren will not have to hold their breath while crossing it. Perhaps they might even pause on the bridge: not to win a game but to watch the river flow clean and free.
Let the Bagmati become not a barrier we escape across but a living presence we defend. If rights can be conferred on faceless firms, there is little reason a river cannot have its day in court. ■
Sonika Mahat is a graduate student in International Development at American University in Washington, D.C.
