KATHMANDU - Sushila Maharjan, 11, is relatively well off by Nepalese standards. Her father Dharma Ratna Maharjan, a businessman, owns a house in Kathmandu, capital of this Himalayan country. Still, Sushila's story can surprise most city children. As a five-year-old, she would carry tiny mugs and pitchers from her house to the stone spouts in her neighbourhood in Alokhiti, a village in southern Lalitpur district, and then back home several times a day. Her elder sister and mother carried even heavier containers.  Everybody in her locality, Ikhache, collected water from the one single source. After all, taps, installed by the state-owned Nepal Water Supply Corp ran dry 12 years ago. Sushila, now a fifth grader, remembers those days with some hint of nostalgia. "It was physically taxing, but it was fun," she says, as she helps her elder sister Sarita wash clothes.  After years of repeated requests to the state water body fell on deaf ears, Sushila's father and his childhood friend Sushil Shrestha decided that they needed to do something on their own. The stone spouts in Alokhiti, the lifeline for the community for nearly 600 years, had to be put to better use.  "It was difficult in the beginning. People just didn't buy the idea," says Shrestha, who now coordinates the Alokhiti Conservation and Drinking Water Supply Consumers' Committee.  Then it all began to change. The prospect of having taps with running water right inside their houses proved too strong a temptation for the locals to ignore. By mid-2003, the two friends had collected over a million rupees (some 14,000 U.S. dollars) in voluntary contributions from 150 houses.  By early 2004, a 10,000-litre tank was installed atop a newly constructed four-storey tower. Alokhiti also got a facelift, and three electric motors were installed to pump to the storage tank from near the spout. There, however, was one more hurdle to clear. For the water in the tank to reach taps in the households, the locals still needed to use the government pipes.  "The corporation people said that using the state-owned pipes would mean paying monthly bills to the government," says Dharma, now the treasurer of the committee. No thanks, said the locals. They had already done so much on their own. They could as well set up their own supply system.  On the first day of the last Nepali new year (Apr. 13, 2004), water gushed through Ikhache's freshly installed pipes to the 150 households of about 900 people.  "All this while the state-owned supply pipes remained idle," says Maharjan, a big smile on his face. The locals partied till late into the night in traditional Newari style, drinking local wines and munching homemade delicacies. For three straight days, priests performed a ritual offering a prayer for forgiveness.  Within weeks, the community's water affluence brought in a flurry of requests from neighbouring localities. Thirty houses in Nagbahal got connected to Ikhache's supply system. While Ikhache locals themselves now pay 100 rupees (1.4 dollars) a month for the supply, the neighbours are charged 125 rupees (1.8 dollars). The proceeds then go to expanding the supply capacity, repairing pipes and conserving Alokhiti.  Each household now gets a supply of about 250 litres a day during the dry season and 350 litres in the rainy season. Water is collected from Alokhiti only for five hours daily, from 6 p.m. to 11 p.m. During the afternoon, the collecting panel is locked and Alokhiti is open to locals for bathing in the sun.  This community effort is significant given poor access to water in parts of the city. The current demand for water in the Kathmandu Valley is 210 million litres a day, while the water corporation supplies only 70 million litres on a yearly average. But the community members want to go farther.  "Our target is to supply water to 500 households, including those in neighbouring localities," says Shrestha, who estimates that the three spouts in Alokhiti generate 240,000 litres of water in the dry season and 500,000 litres in the rainy season.  Owing to the size of the storage tank, only about 50,000 litres of water are being used daily now. Plans are afoot to install a 150,000-litre storage tank soon to supply another 150 houses in neighbouring Nagbahal. The three cities in the Kathmandu valley -- Kathmandu, Lalitpur and Bhaktapur -- are all rich in waterspouts. One estimate puts the number at 700. Locals in Ikhache urge their neighbouring communities to use their own spouts to get similar results.  "Using all these spouts as we have done would meet water needs of about 5,000 families," says Shrestha. That could perhaps solve the valley's chronic water shortage, which peaks during the pre-monsoon months.  While there is a major water project in the works -- the multi-million-dollar Melamchi drinking water project -- it has been hit by a corruption scandal. There is widespread speculation that it may get dumped altogether. Ikhache is the only locality in the entire valley to have its own tap water system.