Kavre, July 30

Most of the quake victims in Kavre, who saw their names included on a list for retro-fitting their houses damaged by the earthquake in 2015, are learnt to be least interested in doing so.

National Reconstruction Authority technicians registered Raju Khanal’s house in Ratamate of Namobuddha Municipality-7 on the list of houses to be retro-fitted. But Khanal is not interested.

Ramhari Humagain of Humagaithok, Namobuddha-8, doesn’t like his home being selected for retro-fitting in the first place.

“There are houses that suffered the same extent of damage as mine and they were identified as ‘fully damaged’ houses and entitled to the housing grant, I don’t know why my house couldn’t make it to the list of houses to be reconstructed,” Humagain wondered.

“I would rather build a new home, a small one, with my own money, rather than retro-fit it,” he added.

In fact, majority of quake victims in Namobuddha, and elsewhere in the district, don’t seem to have taken to the idea of retro-fitting their homes, they say they will rather build a new house using their own money.

NRA Chief Executive Officer Sushil Gyawali had inaugurated the retro-fitting campaign in the district from Chhatra Bahadur Pariyar’s house in Phalante Gaira of Namobuddha-5 in April this year.

As per official data, there are a total of 701 houses that were partially damaged in the 2015 earthquakes and approved as suitable to be used after retro-fitting in Namobuddha Municipality alone. Fifty per cent of the victims are not in favour of retrofitting their houses, according to a survey.

“We carried out a ward-level survey in all the wards of the municipality and found that around 340 families whose houses were registered for retro-fitting didn’t actually want to retro-fit their houses,” said the municipality’s reconstruction section Chief Kamal Kuinkel.

Further, according to Kuinkel, majority of the families whose houses were listed for retro-fitting, weren’t interested in doing so and had requested the municipality to include them on the list of victims eligible for housing grant instead. “In my ward alone, of the 83 families, 73 are not interested in retro-fitting their houses,” said Namobuddha Municipality-4 Ward Chair Uddhav Prasad Kafle.

Altogether, some 1,435 of the 5,625 families in the district have registered applications at the municipality requesting it to keep them on the list of victims eligible for housing grant.

On his part, NRA Executive Member Chandra Bahadur Shrestha said the authority would launch different campaigns to educate the victims about retro-fitting and convince them.

The Department for International Development had signed an agreement with National Reconstruction Authority to retrofit around 1,000 houses that were partially damaged by the earthquakes.