Farmer-Managed Irrigation Systems (FMIS) of Nepal: Raj Kulo, Chhattis & Sorah Mauja

A Farmer-Managed Irrigation System (FMIS) is an irrigation network that is planned, built, operated, financed and maintained by the farmers who use it, rather than by a government agency. In Nepal these systems are usually called kulo (canal) systems, and the larger historic ones are known as raj kulo ("royal canal") or by the number of villages they serve, such as Chhattis Mauja ("36 villages") and Sorah Mauja ("16 villages"). Many have operated continuously for a century or more, some tracing their origins back several centuries.

FMIS are found from the high hills to the Terai plains and irrigate an estimated 70% of Nepal's total irrigated area, which exceeds 1.2 million hectares. Because the state historically had little presence in day-to-day irrigation, farmers organised themselves to divert rivers and streams, dig and line canals, share water fairly, and settle disputes. This makes FMIS both a foundation of Nepali food security and a living form of cultural heritage.

In technical terms, most FMIS use a temporary or semi-permanent diversion structure (often brushwood, boulders and gravel rebuilt each season) at a river intake, a main canal, branch and field channels, and a set of locally agreed rules for allocating water and labour. The systems are largely self-financing: instead of paying fees to a distant office, members contribute labour, materials and cash directly to their own association.

The heart of every FMIS is its water-user association (WUA) - a farmer institution that owns the collective rules. Rights and duties are typically bundled together: a household's share of water is tied to its obligation to supply labour for canal cleaning and repair, and to attend meetings and pay levies. Those who fail to contribute can lose their turn at water, which gives members a strong incentive to cooperate. This linkage of water rights to shared responsibility is what social scientists call a common-pool resource institution.

Governance is usually multi-tiered. Village-level or branch-canal committees handle local distribution, while a central committee coordinates the whole system, negotiates with the government, and manages major repairs. Paid functionaries - with local titles such as muktiyar, meth muktiyar (chief steward) and messengers - supervise water turns, call out labour and keep accounts. Decisions on rotations, penalties and annual maintenance are taken in mass assemblies, giving FMIS a grassroots, democratic character.

Because these rules evolved locally, they vary from system to system and are well adapted to their setting. Nepali FMIS have become internationally famous in the study of the commons: political economist Elinor Ostrom, who won the 2009 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, and collaborators such as Ganesh P. Shivakoti used Nepali irrigation systems as key evidence that communities can govern shared resources sustainably without top-down state control or privatisation.

The Chhattis Mauja Irrigation System (CMIS) in Rupandehi district is Nepal's best-known FMIS and one of the largest farmer-built and farmer-managed schemes in the country. Its name means "36 maujas" (villages or revenue units), reflecting the settlements it was originally built to serve. The system is generally described as around 170 years old, established by pioneering farmers - with the indigenous Tharu community playing a central role - who diverted water from the Tinau River near present-day Butwal onto the gently sloping Terai.

Today CMIS commands well over 3,000 hectares and has grown to serve more villages than its historic name suggests, with a main canal roughly 11 kilometres long fed by a temporary open intake on the Tinau. Cropping is intensive - paddy, wheat, maize, mustard and potato are grown in rotation - and the system is repeatedly cited for high cropping intensity and widespread adoption of improved seed. It has received national and international recognition as an award-winning example of sustainable, self-governed irrigation.

Management runs through a four-tier water-user association. Village-level mauja committees are grouped into nine ilakas (zones), each represented on a central committee that coordinates the whole system. A small paid staff led by the meth muktiyar oversees day-to-day water distribution and mobilises the large labour force needed each year to rebuild the intake and de-silt the canals. Studies have also examined gaps in the system, noting that although women form a substantial share of the general membership, they are under-represented on the central committee.

Immediately alongside Chhattis Mauja lies the Sorah Mauja Irrigation System (SMIS), whose name means "16 maujas." The two systems are historically linked because they draw from the same Tinau River. The first stretch of canal - about the first four kilometres from the intake - is used jointly by both systems, and at a fixed dividing point the flow is shared by a long-standing agreement, commonly cited as roughly 60% to Chhattis Mauja and 40% to Sorah Mauja.

This shared headworks is itself a remarkable feat of inter-community cooperation: two separate farmer institutions have, for well over a century, jointly maintained a common intake and agreed how to split a variable and sometimes scarce river flow. The arrangement is frequently studied as an example of how neighbouring commons users avoid conflict through clear, enforceable sharing rules rather than litigation or state arbitration.

Like Chhattis Mauja, Sorah Mauja is organised through village-level mauja committees under a central water-user association, with paid stewards supervising rotations and calling out seasonal labour. Together the Sorah-Chhattis complex irrigates a large command area of the Rupandehi Terai and is routinely presented, in Nepali and international literature, as a model of participatory, sustainable irrigation management.

In the Kathmandu Valley the word raj kulo ("royal canal") refers to state-sponsored medieval canals that combined irrigation with urban water supply. Canal-building in the valley dates at least to the Licchavi era (roughly 450-750 CE), when early channels irrigated paddy land, though those earliest canals have since disappeared. The great surviving raj kulo tradition belongs to the Malla period, especially the 17th and early 18th centuries, when the rival kings of Kathmandu, Patan and Bhaktapur each commissioned long canals to bring water from the surrounding foothills into their cities.

The best-documented is the Patan raj kulo, associated with the Tikabhairav canal, which carried water from the Lele and Naldu rivers in the southern hills - a route of roughly 11 kilometres - to the Patan Durbar Square area. In Bhaktapur, King Jitamitra Malla built a raj kulo in 1678 CE drawing on the Mahadev Pokhari spring, while in Kathmandu a canal is attributed to King Pratap Malla. Beyond irrigating fields, these canals fed royal ponds and the valley's famous dhunge dhara (stone water spouts, or hiti); by some accounts around 51 hitis in Patan alone were supplied by the royal canals.

The raj kulo therefore blur the line between purely farmer-managed systems and state infrastructure: they were royally commissioned but, after the courts that built them faded, were kept alive for generations by the communities that depended on them. Most of the historic raj kulo are now degraded or defunct owing to urbanisation, encroachment and neglect, and their partial revival - to recharge groundwater and restore heritage stone spouts - has become an active conservation cause in the valley.

For most of Nepal's history the government was a minor player in irrigation. The Department of Irrigation was established in 1952, and only from the 1980s did the state systematically begin to assist existing FMIS - improving intakes and canals through projects while trying not to undermine the farmer institutions that made them work. Nepal's irrigation policy and regulations formally recognise water-user associations and encourage participatory or "joint" management, and turnover of agency schemes to WUAs became a common approach.

Civil-society bodies also champion these systems. The Farmer Managed Irrigation Systems Promotion Trust (FMIST), a self-managed Nepali trust, promotes the sustainability of FMIS and treats them as national cultural heritage that supplies about 70% of the country's irrigated area. It is best known for organising a long-running series of international seminars on FMIS in Kathmandu that draw scholars and practitioners from around the world.

Today FMIS face serious pressures. Out-migration and labour shortages make it harder to mobilise the collective work that de-silting and intake repair demand; urban and industrial expansion is eating into command areas; and climate change is altering river flows and monsoon reliability. Whether Nepal's centuries-old water institutions can adapt - by mechanising maintenance, integrating with modern schemes, and keeping their rules legitimate as villages change - is now a central question for the country's food and water security.