Thimi, February 13:

The agitating locals of Duwakot Village Development Committee in Bhaktapur today called off their strike after the Kathmandu Upatyaka Khanepani Limited (KUKL), Madhyapur Thimi branch, agreed to supply them with drinking water within three months.

Some 500 locals from Ward No 7, 8 and 9 of the Village Development Committee were staging sit-in in front of the Bode Drinking Water Production and Distribution Centre, demanding that they be provided with drinking water.

Krishna Hari Khadka, president of the struggle committee and a resident of Duwakot-8, said that project was not supplying water to the locals though it had been collecting water from the Village Development Committee and supplying to other places.

The locals of Duwakot Village Development Committee had yesterday blocked production and distribution of water by the project, accusing it of depriving them of their rights to use the local water resource.

Though the project started some 26 years ago, locals of Duwakot Village Development Committee had not been able to utilise their local resource.

“We were deprived of our right to use the local resource. Therefore we had to close the machines used in pumping water from nine wells and seven boring pumps,” he said.

An agreement was signed today in the presence of security officers with the Kathmandu

Upatyaka Khanepani Limited, Thimi branch, to supply water to the locals within the next three months, he added.

Currently, the project collects 10 million litres of water from Bode and one million litres from Lokanthali and supplies it to different parts of Kathmandu valley. The project supplies four million litres to Kathmandu, two million litres to Bhaktapur and four million litres to Thimi.