SCADA-Managed Melamchi Water Distribution
🤖 AI-generated summary of the sources below · 🔎 Last verified
This overview was generated with AI from the public sources listed below and checked against them before publication. It has not had a complete human fact-check — treat it as a starting point and follow the sources.
Kathmandu's household water now flows through a distribution network rebuilt for the Melamchi project: ten new reservoirs holding 74,500 cubic metres, 77 km of bulk lines sized for 220 million litres a day and over 1,800 km of new distribution pipes, monitored from a central SCADA control room that also tracks turbidity and chlorine levels; 14 of 33 planned district metered areas had been handed to the utility KUKL by mid-2025. The bottleneck is the water itself, not the network: since floods destroyed the Melamchi headworks in June 2021, the 26-km tunnel has run on temporary intakes and closes every monsoon — on 3 July 2026 a flood again halted the roughly 170 million litres a day it delivers in the dry season, leaving the automated network to ration older sources on published schedules for months.
📊 Impact
Around 170 million litres a day delivered into the valley network in the dry season and 14 of 33 district metered areas operational by mid-2025 — project- and operator-reported; no independent audit of losses or DMA performance has been published.
🎓 Lesson
Automating distribution is the easy half: a SCADA-run network still rations by schedule when its single source closes every monsoon — the data layer manages scarcity rather than ending it.
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📎 Cite this project
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “SCADA-Managed Melamchi Water Distribution” — Kathmandu, Nepal. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/kathmandu-melamchi-scada-distribution/ (last verified 2026-08-07). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.