Eleven metres of footbridge, and a school year

There is a version of this story that takes four hundred words. A gorge, a school on the wrong side of it, a bridge, children crossing. It photographs well and it is not false.

The version that is actually useful is about the eighteen months before any steel arrived, most of which Fieldstone spent being unpopular.

Between 2015 and 2018, Fieldstone commissioned three gravity-fed water systems in the Sanjala Valley. All three were competently engineered. All three had failed by 2019.

None failed for an engineering reason. One lost a length of pipe to a landslip and nobody had funds to replace it. One had a broken tap stand for fourteen months. One was disconnected by a household dispute that no institution existed to resolve. The combined cost of preventing all three failures would have been in the order of €200 a year each.

The standard Priya wrote afterwards is short. Before Fieldstone commissions anything, a committee must exist, be constituted locally, publish accounts, agree a levy sufficient to cover projected annual maintenance, and — the part that caused the arguments — actually collect and hold that levy for twelve months first.

In Thulo Sanjala this meant that a community which had asked for a footbridge in early 2017 did not see one begin construction until late 2018. The committee raised 34,000 rupees in its first year and was, by the account of everyone I spoke to, extremely irritated about the whole exercise.

Every system commissioned in the Sanjala Valley since the standard was introduced is still in operation. In 2023 a cable anchor on the Thulo Sanjala bridge required replacement. The committee paid for it, arranged it, and completed the work in eleven days. Fieldstone learned about it at the annual inspection, four months later.

That is the outcome the eighteen months bought, and it does not photograph at all.