The Problem: Everyone’s Going to Katmandu : Himalayas: About 1 million of Nepal’s 20 million residents live in Katmandu Valley. That means gridlock, smog, pollution, a housing shortage. No relief is in sight.

KATMANDU, Nepal —  Noisy three-wheeled taxis, smoky automobiles and aggressively driven motorbikes compete with pedestrians and pedicabs in unending gridlock.

Toxic haze from the exhaust in this south Asian capital obliterates views of the world’s highest mountains. The Himalayas were a sight to behold a few decades ago.

The stench from heaps of trash and garbage further befouls the air. Sewage treatment is minimal. Human and industrial wastes pollute the Bagmati and other rivers. Drinking water is limited and contaminated. Electricity is rationed. Housing is so scarce and expensive that families often are forced to live in one room.

Everybody agrees that the deluge of people is the heart of Katmandu’s problem. About 1 million of Nepal’s 20 million residents are crowded into the fertile Katmandu Valley, which covers little more than 12 by 15 miles.

Katmandu is the centuries-old magnet for Nepalese from other parts of this impoverished agricultural nation, where people in mountain villages still use wooden plows and carry backbreaking loads over precipitous trails. Many covet city life.

Nobody has given up on solutions yet. Since the long-closed Hindu kingdom opened its doors in 1951, enormous amounts of money and assistance have poured in from international donors such as the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, Western nations and Japan and from nonprofit organizations, among them CARE and Save the Children Federation.

The dawn of democracy in 1990, after decades of corruption and despotism, offered new hope.

But it didn’t remove the skepticism of citizens like Dinesh Thapa. “I sort of blame the government for lack of a policy, which has increased the number of outsiders moving into Katmandu,” he said.

Situated in the hills between Nepal’s high mountains to the north and its Terai lowlands to the south, Katmandu is conveniently located between neighboring giants China and India and has been a trade center for centuries.

Carpets, Nepal’s biggest product, are manufactured here. Tourism, the second-largest industry, attracted more than 300,000 visitors to the gateway capital last year.

“I stay in Katmandu to survive,” said Thapa, 34, a naturalist who has lived here since childhood.

Thapa works for a resort and tour company and makes a relatively good living in a country where the per-capita income is less than $170 a year. He owns a motorcycle and lives with his wife and infant son in his in-laws’ house. But eventually he will move away from the congestion.

Little more than 30 years ago, Katmandu’s population was 121,000. Today it is about a half-million--even larger when the adjoining cities of Patan and Bhaktapur are included.

Although the uncontrolled expansion is worst in the valley, the national growth rate is also high--2.7%. The population is projected to double by 2020.

The Nepalese labor force is expected to grow by 400,000 people a year for the next 10 years, twice the average of the 1980s, according to the World Bank. At the same time, cultivable land in Nepal is being used up.

“In the absence of an effective program to slow population growth, all other measures will be meaningless,” a World Bank report stated.

Agriculture alone won’t eliminate poverty, the report continued. “The basis for long-term (economic) growth, if it is to come at all, must thus eventually be sought in the expansion of services, energy and industry.”

That will mean more pressure on Katmandu. “If we could divert industries from Katmandu, that would bring relief, because it would create jobs outside the city,” said Umesh B. Malla, an official in Nepal’s Ministry of Housing and Physical Planning.

Malla suggests development of secondary magnet cities, accessible by high-speed highways, and another international airport, located somewhere south of Katmandu.

“Water is the biggest problem. Otherwise, things can be taken care of,” Malla said. Bringing water from the northern mountains to Katmandu would be extremely costly and take five to 10 years.

The Japanese government recently developed an improvement plan for the Katmandu Valley. A $12-million loan from the Asian Development Bank is helping to upgrade Katmandu’s basic services, such as water, sanitation and the winding dirt lanes that pass for streets.

“I don’t see anything happening in the near future to change what seems to be the inexorable urbanization of the Katmandu Valley,” said Kelly C. Kammerer, who recently returned to Washington after more than three years as mission director in Nepal for the U.S. Agency for International Development.

“There’s been no planning. There are studies by the score,” he said. “It’s just been willy-nilly, and the city and surrounding areas are overwhelmed.”

USAID has had offices in Katmandu for 42 years. Much of its current $17- million budget is spent on child survival and family planning, agriculture and agribusiness and strengthening Nepal’s new democracy.

“Having bigger population centers in the Terai makes sense, I suppose,” Kammerer said. “Most Nepalese industry and most agriculture is in the Terai.”

But Tulasi R. Joshi doesn’t see decentralization as the answer. Nepal-born Joshi, a geographer at Fairmont State College in West Virginia, has proposed a land bank, under the direction of a new development authority, to bring order to the valley’s urbanization.

“I don’t think the time has come to have people live in other places,” Joshi said. “What the valley needs is planning.”

“Nepal really does not have control over its own destiny,” said Mark H. Freeman, an American who has lived in Katmandu and favors decentralization.

“Since the 1950s Nepal has been a creature of the donors, and the donors have pretty much set the agenda for the country,” explained Freeman, a program officer for the nonprofit Meridian International Center in Washington.

Kammerer sees hope in the increasing number of Nepalese who no longer shrug off outsiders’ complaints.

“Now it’s not just the donors, not just the foreigners who are pointing out the problems of unregulated growth and rapid population increases,” he said. “It’s Nepalese citizens--normal, average people.”