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Urgency to rebuild Nepal ahead of monsoon rains could lead to "build back worse": UN official

Xinhua, July 9, 2015 Adjust font size:

As Nepal faces the onset of monsoon rains, the urgent need to rebuild could lead to buildings at risk of collapse due to poor compliance with building codes, John Ging, operations director for the UN Office of the Coordination for Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) told journalists here Wednesday.

"We are now facing the onset of the monsoon season," Ging, who recently returned from Nepal, said at a press conference. "In the urgency to rebuild, in the impoverishment that is there, we have to be alert to the real danger of there being a build back worse rather than a build back better."

At least 2.2 million people lost their homes after a devastating 7.8-magnitude earthquake hit Nepal on April 28. Another 7.3-magnitude earthquake hit the region on May 12.

"Most of the housing that I saw -- and talking to the engineers- - collapsed because of poor compliance with the building codes," Ging said. "And in fact it was shockingly poor compliance."

"When we talk about schools being destroyed they literally collapsed," he said. Fortunately at the time the quake hit -- 11: 56 a.m. on a Saturday -- students were not in their classrooms.

Ging said the poor quality of structures being rebuilt was in part due to Nepal's poverty.

"Even before the quake, Nepal is and has been a fragile country when it comes to the levels of poverty," he said.

Ging, therefore, called for a very quick international response to a funding shortfall in the UN's humanitarian appeal for Nepal, as the monsoon season intensifies.

The appeal for 422 million U.S. dollars has only been 46 percent funded, he said. "We hope to see that mobilized very quickly because people cannot stand in the rain."

Meanwhile, Ging acknowledged major donors so far.

Private donors, he said, had been the biggest single source of funding. Even before the crisis, Ging said, 25 percent of Nepal's gross domestic product came from remittances -- money sent home from Nepalese people living overseas.

Besides private donors, Ging also acknowledged that the United States, Norway, the United Kingdom, China and Thailand had made significant contributions to the appeal. Endite