KATHMANDU, Nepal — Nepalese officials this week announced a temporary, two-story height limit on new buildings, even as post-earthquake rebuilding projects are breaking ground.
The rule, put in place on Monday, will apply until a revision of national building rules is completed, said Purna Chandra Bhattarai, a spokesman at the Ministry of Federal Affairs and Local Development. “We have now decided to fix a two-story limit on all new buildings, be they commercial or residential, for the time being.”
Mr. Bhattarai said that the government intended to announce a new national building code by July.
The need for new standards, and their rapid application, is acute. Buildings higher than two stories are especially vulnerable to collapse if they have not been constructed to withstand earthquakes.
Prime Minister Sushil Koirala announced on Sunday that 500,000 houses had been destroyed and 300,000 had been badly damaged in quakes and aftershocks that have rippled across Nepal since April 25, when a 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck. He said 100,000 government buildings had been destroyed.
City officials in Kathmandu said they welcomed the government’s efforts to crack down on poor and illegal construction practices.
“The heights of buildings should be limited and standards for roads and compound walls should be fixed immediately,” said Yogeshwar Krishna Parajuli, the chief development commissioner of the Kathmandu Valley Development Authority, which includes Kathmandu, the capital.
But builders said the decision to restrict new buildings to two stories, even temporarily, was a mistake.
“Restriction is not a solution,” said Ichchhya Raj Tamang, president of the Nepal Land and Housing Developers’ Association. “Instead, we should focus on how to make our buildings safer by utilizing better technology and construction methods.”
Officials said that they would halt construction of any buildings planned for higher than two stories, but whether such a halt can be put in place in outlying areas or enforced in the cities is uncertain. Much of the devastation in Kathmandu was due not to poorly written codes — the laws were updated in the 1990s — but to the fact that they were widely flouted as the city’s population nearly tripled to 1.74 million in 2011 from 675,000 in 1991.
Nepal’s government has been paralyzed for decades by civil war and fractured politics, making enforcement of construction laws difficult.
Residents and building experts say corruption is an open secret, as evidenced by the unlicensed five- and six-story buildings that have risen in recent years. Developers who slap up the buildings, the residents and experts say, know they will rarely be punished by officials, who are often happy to look the other way for a price.
Officials, for their part, blame developers for submitting false plans. “The weak implementation of building codes was one of the key factors behind a huge number of house collapses in Kathmandu,” Gopi Khanal, an official in Kathmandu’s building department, said in an interview. “Most people presented us with false designs showing a two-story house when what they really built was a six- or seven-story building.”
Officials said that the new regulations would include land-use planning rules to ensure houses are safely sited, public right-of-ways respected and open spaces maintained. Officials said they would insist that compound walls not exceed four feet in height. The collapse of high compound walls across Kathmandu was the cause of many injuries and deaths.
Unapproved building on public lands and right-of-ways is routine throughout South Asia, with developers hoping that pop-up neighborhoods quickly gain enough political clout to ensure that officials are unable to require that they be razed. Once such neighborhoods are “regularized,” or made legal, governments then must provide services such as water and sewage connections. Slipshod building practices and dangerous siting are rarely revisited.
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