Floods in Nepal's Gorkha District Sweep Away Homes and Bridges, Five Missing
After the Flood, the Bridges Come First
Flash floods in Nepal have swept away houses, bridges, and a hydroelectric project; the first duty now is not grand design but the humble work of restoring the market’s arteries while keeping disaster merchants at bay.
A landslide in Nepal’s Gorkha district, we are told, blocked the Budhi Gandaki River and sent a muddy torrent downstream. About a dozen houses, several suspension bridges, and part of a hydroelectric project — construction equipment and all — were swept away. Around fifty people were rescued from the riverbanks; two women and three men remain unaccounted for. Authorities speak of evacuation orders and missing hydrological instruments, and they compare this lesser surge to an earlier glacier collapse that killed more than a thousand. To a distant reader these are numbers and proper names; to those on the spot they are broken roofs, severed roads, and the sudden, sickening knowledge that tomorrow’s income has been washed away.
When I wrote in the Wealth of Nations of the sovereign’s duties, I distinguished between those works which private interest can conduct for profit, and those which, though beneficial to society, could never recompense the expense of any private undertaker. Bridges across dangerous rivers, roads through difficult country, defences against inundation, belong firmly to this latter class. They enlarge the market for every farmer, weaver, and carpenter who depends upon getting goods to buyers and buyers to goods. When such works are shattered in an instant, we see in sharp negative what is ordinarily invisible: the quiet daily service of public works to the industry of common people.
The suspension bridges along the Budhi Gandaki, and the highway bridge joining Gorkha to Dhading, were not ornaments; they were the means by which the division of labour could extend beyond the narrowest valley. A weaver with only his own village for a market can specialise but little; a weaver with a whole district, a whole country, a whole trading world reached by reliable bridges and roads, can refine his art and lower his price. When a flood tears out those crossings, it does not merely interrupt traffic; it contracts the extent of the market, forces labour back into coarser employments, and, if long neglected, reverses the natural progress of opulence.
Yet the account books of calamity can be strangely misleading. The lost houses, the washed‑away equipment, the missing hydrological station are obvious losses. The contracts for rebuilding bridges, repairing hydropower works, and supplying temporary shelters will appear in some ledgers as an increase of employment and profit. It is tempting for the comfortable to console themselves that reconstruction is a kind of boon. But the impartial spectator, whose judgment I sought to describe in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, will look beyond the mason’s new wage to the peasant’s dearer salt, the porter’s longer walk, the child kept from school because the bridge is gone. The unseen payer of these costs is almost always the labouring poor.
Wherever there is new public spending, there will quickly appear, as I long ago observed, people of the same trade eager to turn it into a conspiracy against the public. The destruction of a hydroelectric project and the urgent need for new bridges will summon not only honest builders but also ingenious projectors, full of schemes to secure exclusive contracts, protective clauses, and generous guarantees, all, of course, in the name of national progress and safety. One must listen with the most suspicious attention when any set of merchants or contractors proposes that only they, under special favour, can save the country; experience suggests they are mainly saving their own profits from the discipline of competition.
The state, however, cannot on that account fold its arms. Natural disasters are precisely the occasions that reveal why I assigned to the sovereign certain duties beyond defence and courts of justice. To restore the washed‑out crossings quickly, to strengthen riverbanks where experience now shows them weak, to collect and publish whatever sound hydrological information can be gathered once new instruments are installed — these are not the dreams of the man of system, rearranging society like pieces on a chess‑board; they are the modest offices of a government that understands the limits, yet also the necessity, of its own agency. The impartial spectator would expect no less of any humane administration.
The question, then, is not whether the Nepalese authorities should rebuild, but how they should contrive to do so in a manner that truly serves those who stand ankle‑deep in the mud today. That implies bridges placed where markets actually flow, not where vanity would cut a ribbon; contracts open to rival bidders, not confined to the best‑connected petitioners; flood protections designed in light of recent experience, not copied from obsolete plans. Taxes must pay for this work, and so the burden should fall with some regard to ability, to certainty, to convenience, and to frugality in collection. If, when the waters subside, the labouring poor find that their crossings are stronger, their markets wider, and their burdens not unduly increased, we may say that, for once, misfortune has been answered by something better than pious speeches and profitable ruins.
In truth, I cannot know from these brief reports how wisely or foolishly the work of restoration will be conducted, and it is this ignorance, rather than any doubt of first principles, that limits my judgment.
From the works cited
- An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations — The sovereign's three duties (defence, justice, public works and institutions, including education for the common people) and the four maxims of taxation: equality, certainty, convenience, economy.
- An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations — The division of labour is limited by the extent of the market: whatever widens the market — roads, ports, peace, cheap carriage, open trade — deepens specialization and enriches; whatever fragments it impoverishes.
- The Theory of Moral Sentiments — Judge conduct by the impartial spectator: what would a well-informed, disinterested observer feel about this action? Praise-worthiness matters more than praise; to be loved without being lovely is worth nothing, and to be blamed unjustly stings less than to deserve blame.