Lift Irrigation Master Plan — Kaligandaki & Aadhikhola Basins

Gandaki Province holds substantial irrigable land above its rivers rather than beside them, which makes lift the only realistic option across much of Syangja, Tanahu and Palpa. Lift schemes are also where provincial irrigation budgets get spent least efficiently, because each one is proposed in isolation and judged on its own merits rather than against the alternatives.

e2services prepared a development-oriented master plan identifying and prioritising lift irrigation sub-projects across the Kaligandaki and Aadhikhola basins. The work combined basin-scale understanding of source availability with field verification of candidate command areas, then ranked schemes on a consistent basis so the province could sequence investment rather than react to requests.

Prioritisation is the substance of an assignment like this. Pumping head, energy cost, command area, delivered cost per hectare and the recurrent burden on each users' committee all had to be assessed comparably — a scheme that is technically feasible and operationally unaffordable has simply deferred its failure to the handover.

The plan was delivered to the Integrated River Basin Irrigation and Water Resources Management Program in a form suited to provincial water resources programming, with the identified sub-projects staged for progressive development.