No Lights on in Nepal: Where's the Electricity?

Imagine if you had power for only half the day and for the other half, you were expected to get on with your life as usual and make do with candles and generators and a great deal of ingenuity.

That’s exactly what the country of Nepal is currently facing and things are expected to get worse before they get better. In a country that is touted as the second richest country in fresh water resources, the people and economy of Nepal are in the throes of what the Maoist-led government has continued to call ‘load shedding’ which is basically on ongoing rotating blackout. The Nepal Electrical Authority (NEA), through its website, tries its best to keep the public informed as to when the lights will go out. The amateurish website, however, only confuses the matter. The schedule, printed exclusively in Nepali, is approximate at the best of times. Indeed, a recent editorial in the English daily Kathmandu Post, after finding a number of faults with the website including an outdated report on the problem, called the website ‘a mockery…in the era of advanced information technology’. If online malfeasance was the only fault associated with the NEA, few would get riled up about it. The reality, however, is far more ominous than this. Nepalis are having to endure a total of ten hours per day without electricity. Everyone makes do as best they can – those who can afford it start up noisy diesel generators while those who can’t, settle with headlamps, candles or moonlight. If this doesn’t strike you as severe, consider the following. According to the Kathmandu Post, scores of factories have been forced to cut production by up to 80 percent while some have shut down completely, citing the lack of a dependable electricity supply. It goes without saying that companies just cannot pay workers to sit around idly waiting for the lights to go on. As a result, inflation is spiking sharply. It’s not only large companies feeling the pinch. Small shop owners including those providing services such as photocopying or desktop publishing are also meeting with difficulty. The lack of electricity is wreaking havoc on the tourist industry also. Hotel owners are fed up. “We can’t take anymore of this. This is ridiculous. How are we supposed to survive?” voiced a man operating a hotel in Thamel, the backpacker neighbourhood of Kathmandu. Certainly, the area, normally quite decked out in neon splendour is now most nights under a pall of darkness save for the occasional sign and a battery-operated light here and there. Let’s face it – no one is going to browse through your shop in candlelight no matter how romantic that may sound. Load shedding has been a reality in Nepal for a few years now. To give you an idea on how much the situation is deteriorating, the website english.ohmynews.com reported back in 2006 that Nepalis were suffering through seventeen hours of load shedding a week! Now it is up to seventy. The Kathmandu Post has quipped, “Enough is enough”. The situation, apparently, is destined to get much worse before it gets better. One of the major power plants in the country is in danger of going offline due to major work necessary to avert complete breakdown. There are rumours that load shedding will soon increase to fourteen hours per day and some, including the Prime Minister, have floated the trial balloon of a day with eighteen hours with zero electricity. The PM used this last figure in defense of an emergency reactionary measure enacted recently to marginally boost production through the use of diesel-powered generation. This, however, is not expected to be online until next summer. The measure will cost the country hundreds of millions of dollars. This certainly falls far short of the grand promises the Maoist leadership promised before the national elections took place half a year ago. Granted, the current government is still in a stage of infancy and people are prepared to be patient up to a point. But given the apparent ineptitude of the NEA, folks may be waiting for a long time to come. How did all this come to be? How could a country blessed with vast water resources be facing such a crisis as this? The answers are subtly hinted at in the Nepali media. Fury behind closed doors with the deplorable turn of events has not quite translated onto the printed page yet. You still need to be careful with what is said and how it is said in the country. Last week, a group of thugs associated with a Maoist-led union in the capital city stormed the offices of a major news media organization, injuring and scaring the crap out of a number of employees just trying to do their job. In a somewhat quixotic arrangement, Nepal sells electricity to India but then buys over two times as much back from the country that borders it to the south. You can imagine how much money has fled Nepal once that odd deal was penned. There are also whispered grumblings of an ‘electricity mafia’. To fuel the fire, government officials who are supposed to be espousing communist equality are savouring the comforts of uninterrupted electricity consumption. There is a stench of corruption in the air. Few countries have more NGO’s working in the field than Nepal. Almost a quarter of tourists one encounters on a given day in the country have volunteered to some extent with one organization or the other. Strangely though, with all these funds pouring in, very little of it, if any, is being diverted into significantly addressing the country’s most pressing problem. To be fair, government officials claim that due to a dry season, reservoir levels are dangerously low. Some fatalistic citizens blame it all on the fact that Nepal is a poor country but this is only a half-truth. Yes, there is poverty in the country but there is certainly enough to make electricity production a priority, to move in a direction that starts to solve this issue, and to take it seriously. Otherwise, in the midst of the current global economic deep-freeze, this fragile economy will tank further with the very real possibility that the political climate will degenerate into another period of renewed chaos. The Nepali people endured over a decade of strife and violence, and now with a fledgling democracy already under threat, they deserve better than this.