Puspa Raj Ghimire

Upper Balephi 'A' Hydropower Project

Project Manager · Balephi Hydropower Ltd. · Dec 2024 — Present

A 36 MW run-of-river plant fighting back after catastrophic monsoon flooding. I manage the full civil rehabilitation and capacity-strengthening programme — while the river keeps flowing and the grid keeps waiting.

Signature works

• Headworks armour — 146.5 m of intake upstream bank protection: rebar-tied boulder infill concreted with M25, dry-stacked riprap to road level, plus causeway and cascade drops.
• Weir reconstruction — the 40 m, three-panel weir rebuilt from the foundation up: chipping to 15–40 cm, anchored Ø16 meshes at 150 mm c/c, and a 20–50 cm C60 abrasion-resistant crest.
• Undersluice restoration — the 55.75 m scour-damaged undersluice rebuilt with M60/M25 concrete and specialist repair systems: Mapegrout T80, Mapefill 08, Mapegel UTT and PU grouting.
• River training at scale — a 58.7 m × 10 m undersluice floodwall on a 2.5 m cutoff; an 81.7 m floodwall shielding an exposed transmission-tower pile; 156 m of riprap-with-infill along the tailrace and switchyard, crowned with gabions.
• New settling basin — an 85 m × 13.6 m, ~14 m deep V-channel desander expansion to protect turbines at peak generation.
• Non-explosive demolition — a 1,150 m³ mid-river boulder that was pushing the river into the floodwall, dismantled systematically with Crackmite chemical agent and hydraulic breakers — no explosives, no damage to live structures.

By the numbers

Rasuwagadhi Hydroelectric Project

Site In-Charge — Headrace Tunnel & Powerhouse · Rasuwagadi Hydropower Co. Ltd. / SMEC International · 2018 — 2024

Six and a half years on the underground heart of a 111 MW plant on the Bhote Koshi — 80 m³/s design discharge, 169 m gross head, geology from sound gneiss to squeezing Class V ground. As the owner's counterpart to the consultant, my signature stood on every metre of excavation, support, lining and grouting.

Signature works

• 4,184.5 m headrace tunnel — drill-and-blast through five rock classes of migmatitic gneiss, quartzite and schist; NATM support totalling 12,187 rock bolts, 181 steel-rib sets, ~6,900 m³ of shotcrete and 1,779 forepoling bars.
• 72.75 m surge shaft — 16 m in diameter, crowned at EL. 1827 m, sunk from a 1.4 m pilot well with staged ring support; later host to a value-engineered sectional gate replacing an untransportable 70 t isolation valve.
• ≈35,000 m³ of concrete — including 891 m of full-section RCC lining cast in 27 blocks behind a custom 6+6 m steel mould trolley, alongside 230 invert blocks.
• Grouting campaign — 5,508 holes of consolidation and backfill grouting consuming ~700 t of cement; post-pressure-test re-grouting to seal every seepage path.
• Crisis engineering — a crown collapse at Ch. 1+996 and a shear-zone cavity at Ch. 2+112, stabilised through muck buttressing, grout curtains, steel-arch recovery and metre-by-metre re-excavation.
• Through commissioning — water filling and pressure testing of the entire conveyance system (Jan–May 2024), instrumentation interpretation, rectification and handover of a plant that now runs.

By the numbers

Upper Tamakoshi Hydroelectric Project

Civil Engineer — Consultant's Site Team · Dec 2016 — Jul 2018

Nepal's largest hydropower plant — 456 MW carved into the high Himalaya of Dolakha. On the consultant's team, I supervised construction and final inspections across the project's core structures: headworks, desander cavern, headrace tunnel, surge shaft, penstock, powerhouse and transformer caverns, tailrace, take-off yard, permanent bridges and slope protection.

Key contributions

• Construction supervision of the project's component structures — headrace tunnel, surge shaft, penstock shaft and adit tunnels — with quantity estimation and QA/QC of all support works for variation assessment.
• Lining & grouting — invert and full-section RCC lining works; consolidation, contact and jet grouting supervision.
• Documentation — bar bending schedules, shuttering survey details, IPC verification and progress reporting.
• Inspections & commissioning — construction and final inspections of all major components, and monitoring of water filling–dewatering of the conveyance system.