Kathmandu's Hiti Revival — Restoring Traditional Stone Spouts for Groundwater-Fed Water Supply

Details

Maturity

Pilot

Promoter

Kathmandu Metropolitan City (Heritage & Tourism Department); Kathmandu Valley Water Supply Management Board; local Guthi trusts and consumers' committees

Period

2019–ongoing (Sango Hiti restored 2023; Ga: Hiti restoration begun 2025)

Keywords

urban water supply, groundwater recharge, heritage conservation, community water management

Context

Results

Implementation

Indicative cost

Medium (€50k–€500k)

Time to results

Medium (1–3 years)

Staffing & skills

Kathmandu Metropolitan City Heritage and Tourism Department, local Guthi trusts and consumers' committees

Conditions for success

• valley-wide (not just site-by-site) restoration prioritisation
• independent post-restoration flow/recharge monitoring

Common failure modes

• nearly all tested spouts contaminated with E. coli, indicating ongoing management gaps

Commonly funded by

National / regional programmes

Indicative funding routes for practices of this type — always check each programme's current calls and eligibility rules.

Do you run this practice? Claim it — verified implementers get a public contact pathway and can propose corrections.

Data sources

Where this practice's information was retrieved from, and when.

• C-NAPSE web research — accessed 2026-09-23
• Kathmandu Metropolitan City (Heritage & Tourism Department); Kathmandu Valley Water Supply Management Board; local Guthi trusts and consumers' committees — accessed 2026-09-23
• Kathmandu Valley's stone spouts were once gushing with water — Kathmandu Post — accessed 2026-09-23
• Kathmandu metropolis begins reconstruction of Ga: Hiti — Khabarhub — accessed 2026-09-23
• The State of Traditional Stone Spouts in Relation to Their Use and Management in Kathmandu Valley, Nepal — ResearchGate — accessed 2026-09-23

Attachments

• Source image