April in Sitalpati is a hot, brooding month. The trees here stand tall like a hallmark of an unbeknownst irony. The lush of the early-spring trees make for a stark contrast against the grey rocky mountains, and the blue of the early spring sky is enclosed by hills on all sides. Just beyond it runs the Sunkoshi—deep and turquoise. Give your head a little tilt upwards, you will eye something fabulously melancholy: the hills are all barren. The sparse trees they boast are all grey and dry. A one-hour walk from the Sitalpati VDC office, just across the Bhimsen Primary School, lies a shabby hastily-nailed down shack—carpenter Setu Bishankhe’s ‘temporary’ residence.

Bishankhe’s house is perched on the slope of the hill which makes for a vantage point that overlooks the hills adjacent to it—the barren swaths of land and Sunkoshi flowing underneath. Here the afternoon sun is punctuated by the cool of breeze wafting from the river below. Sitting under the shade, the zinc sheets’ awning offers, is Bishankhe’s wife, Tanka Kumari Bishankhe, breastfeeding her ‘unintended’ infant.

Tanka Kumari, who is 35, was regularly using the Depo Provera Injection (commonly known as Depo), a temporary means of family planning administered once every three months, when the earthquake struck last year. The family lost much to the quake. Their house was reduced to rubble; and Tanka Kumari lost her Depo registration card, a service provided by UNFPA in the district. In the frenzy of the aftermath, birth-control were the least of their worries, and the result: the 3-month-old infant in her lap.

A recent dispatch by the UNFPA—following a survey of the 14 districts hard-hit by the quakes— suggests that 1.4 million women of reproductive age (15-49 years old) were affected by the April earthquake. Among those, 90,000 were pregnant when the quakes rumbled through their homes—many of them giving birth well before their due dates because of the added stress to the system that the temblors brought.

In addition to the women who were already pregnant by 25 April, there has been a spike in pregnancies in the months after as well.  “During the immediate aftermath of the quakes, the health services in the affected districts was interrupted; which resulted to the pregnant women not being able to subscribe the services they were continually subscribing, which has been reported to have increased the birth rate,” said Sanjay Sharma, UNFPA’s district program expert in Sindhuli district.

Not that the increased birthrate following a crisis is unique to Nepal. After the 7.0 magnitude struck Haiti in 2010, the fertility rate in urban areas tripled. Similarly, in New Zealand, the birth rate rose immediately after a 7.0-magnitude quake shook the nation last September. Nine months after New York City experienced a 10-hour blackout in November 1965, births seemed to surge. “The lights went out and people were left to interact with each other,” Paul Siegel, a sociologist, told the New York Times in 1966. 

Studies like these, particularly in western nations, maybe a little tounge-in-cheek, but for an already impoverished neighbourhoods like Sital-pati, the repercussions are far more dire. Setu Bishankhe, a short, slender man in his mid 30s, is the sole breadwinner in his family. He sells his carpenting skills for a living, which had been helping the family get by until the earthquakes of last year.

Now to add to the woes of the family having to pick-up their lives from the rubble, they have another mouth to feed (the family already had three kids aged 13, 8 and 7).

The Bishankhe’s family, in the name of aid, have so far received Rs 25,000 in two tranches but it contributed little to cover the expenses the family has had to bear; without any substantial aid by the government, the families, like Bishankhe’s, have been reeling under an acute pressure to eke out a meager living.

“That is all we’ve got. It has been increasingly difficult for us to manage our lives,” says Setu Bishankhe. “Oh, well. That,” says Setu Bishankhe pointing at a worn-out tarpaulin lying at the corner of his barn, “is also a material we got from one donor.” Setu speaks short, precise sentences and with an unmistakable rage infused to his soft vocals. “Now the only option is to sell whatever little we have—we have come to that stage.”

If the lack of action from the government even one year after the earthquakes has been astounding,  stories like those of the Bishanke family highlight that the deliberations surely cannot continue much further.

Once here, at the barren hilltop of Sitalpati, it becomes increasingly obvious that even though the disaster came in one form, the repercussions it triggers can have a manifold and life-long impact upon the families.