An Idea of Eco-Tol

After doing fieldwork for my thesis and rigorous analysis of the field data I came to following findings :

1. Bagmati river is in the process of rapid degradation leading to unrepairable damage of public health and cultural life.
2. The main features of degradation is water pollution and transformation in river morphology.
3. Main cause can be pointed out to the rapid urbanization but more should be pointed to the inability of people to cope the rapid urbanization.
4. Waste generation and disposal, water use and disposal, expansion of built up area took in such a conventional way that doesn't consider even a bit about the Holy river. I would say it an inability of the society to build on the cultural knowledge with respect to the changing circumstances.
5. This has resulted disgusting state of the mother river of the city whereas rest of the population are living thirty.
6. From fieldwork I gather ample amount of evidences which shows the traditional city dwellers still have strong personal and communal attachment to the river which they express through different cultural activities and traditions. Many traditions have been died out because of recent societal restructuring. But, still we have lots of informations about those traditions.
7. The city dwellers interact with the river through some specific meeting points. Traditionally having some historical, religious and cultural significances, these sites were established as cultural sites. Locally, it is also called 'tirtha'.
8. Along the through length of Bagmati and its tributaries, there hundreds of such site where some dozen site are prominent. Each of those sites hold a group of dweller as stakeholder who are connected culturally with the site and ultimately with river.
9. In case of Shankhamul, those dwellers are living in the traditional city of Patan in cluster neighbourhood locally termed as 'Tol'. Though, the government admistration does not recognize this traditional spatial division, very strong sense of community lies in these Tols.
10. Idea is to exploit the affection, culture, religion Tol-politics and general politics for the sake of improvements in Bagmati. This point outs to work with Tols units.
11. To run a Eco-Tol Movement.
12. Guita - accomodate 200 households and some 900 people. They have strong community feeling. They perform various social and community functions together. Traditionally they are united through a organization called 'Guthi' but these days new form of social organzaitons are proliferating such as cooperative, Tol Sudhar Samiti, Youth Clubs, Maa Pucha, Machaa pucha and Community Library.
13. To give awareness program and skill development program base on these social formats to run environmental project themselves.
14. Another opportunities I am seeing is, these tols area phisically very different that the newly developed area. They have big chunk of open public spaces in form of Lachhi, Nani, Bahal, Bahil, Pond, community Garden etc.
15. These open spaces could be used as waste water treatment area and other environmental recycling and reusing fuctions.
16. If these function could be run based on the notion that waste turning to asset, they'll run it very effectively.
17. The motivation for them could be : Severe Water Shortage, and cultural connections to the Bagmati river.
18. If this idea is absorbed, the model can be replicated to 50 such Tols in Patan and numerous (??? tols) in Kathmandu.
19. New area could be addressed through similar but in differen model.
20. Bio-Gas generation plant has be registered in Carbon trading (CDM kyoto protocol).
21. Working in tol based strategies are not a fully new idea. Yala Urban Health Programme (YUHP) has formed THP volunteers (Tol health programme). They are serving for different health campaigns such as vaccination, child health and maternity health program.