A Tale of Two Four-Wheel-Drives

BIRATNAGAR – Both the Kosi Project and the Sunsan Morang Irrigation Project (SMIP) take water from the Kosi river as it descends to the plains from the eastern Nepal hills, but the similarity ends there. The Project´s target is to irrigate more than 600,000 hectares of land in Bihar, while SMIP has a more modest goal of 66,000 hectares for Nepal.

However, a look at the vehicles that ferry the project bosses around might give the opposite impression. The Kosi Project chief drives his own Willys jeep, a World War II model, which came to the Project when construction began in 1954. His Nepali counterpart is chauf-feured in a three-million-rupee Toyota Land Cruiser.