Dark illogic

Commentary

In January, when load-shedding in Nepal increased from six to eight to twelve, and then to fourteen hours a day, and Kathmandu was for all intents reduced to darkness, the Kantipur television channel decided to make a point by titling its 7 PM news programme the Laltin (‘lantern’) Bulletin. The news reader reads her script in semi-darkness, with a kerosene storm lantern by her side. The station was seeking to inject some urgency among the opinion-making class regarding the reality of a country rich in hydropower facing such devastating power cuts during the winter, as the rivers run low. We have suffered it before, the station managers seemed to be saying. We knew it was coming, we saw it coming, we did nothing about it, and we continue to do nothing about it.

The only problem with Kantipur’s innovative idea was that most households did not have the electricity to watch the Laltin Bulletin.

The inefficiency and illogic that inflicts a society when politics is unstable over decades on end is evident in Nepal today, as if in a laboratory setting. The polarisation of the political landscape, the ultra-nationalism that attaches to hydropower and its development, the fight over potential kickbacks for large projects, the decade of conflict, and the inability of credible civil-society voices to illuminate the way – collectively these ensure that power production has lagged far behind demand. And so Nepal returns to the dark ages, and the manufacturers of inverters and diesel generators revel in society’s lost opportunities and wrong turns.

Nepal is rich in hydropower for a very simple reason. As a country it constitutes a steep gradient in the short distance north-to-south from the Himalaya to the Tarai plains, and the rushing rivers fed by snowmelt, spring water and monsoon runoff carry enormous energy to turn turbines. But you do need the turbines. The tortuous journey of hydropower development in Nepal has led to a generating capacity of no more than 700 MW during the monsoon when the flow is high, a capacity which is said to be a mere one percent of the national potential. When the rivers run low in the winter, the brownouts begin as the output plummes to around 400 MW. The peak demand in winter is 900 MW. Beyond affecting households, the load-shedding makes industrial production inefficient, devastates service industries and keeps foreign investment away.

And yet, even though it looks like the load-shedding can only increase over the next half decade at a minimum, Nepal sees a mushrooming of television channels – those named Mountain, Himalaya and the like the most recent entrants in a field already crowded with a dozen channels amidst plummeting advertising revenues.

Here is another choice example of illogic: for nearly three decades, all road transport from Kathmandu that needs to go east has first gone west. The bulk of passenger traffic to the Valley during this period came from the eastern region, and all goods traffic from the Calcutta port also came from this direction. Yet since 1973, when a highway was built, all goods and passenger traffic from Kathmandu has gone 100 km westwards, along a winding hill road, and then comes back east on a winding semi-hill road to a point about 40 km south of the Valley. From here, the road takes to the Tarai on an eastward course.

The squandering of the people’s time, fuel and tyres over four decades accumulates to a mountain of waste, a suicidal drag on the economy. And yet, with eyes wide open, the people have suffered and the planners planned. Only now is a ‘fast track’ four-lane highway being planned from Kathmandu directly south to the plains; but the work seems to be proceeding as slowly as possible. A Japanese-funded road does snake towards the eastern hills and plains out of Kathmandu, but the Nepali government asked for this to be a one-lane highway – thus guaranteeing gridlock even as the highway opens a few years hence.

Over two centuries, the people’s response to the rapacious Kathmandu state’s lock-hold on the economy has been to migrate to Mughlan (the Indian plains). The inability of the Panchayat regime to process the people’s demand for development and economic growth meant that the people continued to migrate to India during that regime’s existence from 1960 to 1990. The political instability during the democratic era after 1990, and the disarray introduced by the decade-long conflict, forced the subsistence peasantry to reach out further, to the lowliest jobs available in the Persian Gulf and Malaysia.

It is catastrophic that this outflow of the poorest of Nepal is bound to continue for at least another decade – and this from a country that has the natural resources to be one of the better-off societies of Southasia. The electricity brownouts are an indication of a malaise of unstable politics, in a society where the earlier tussle was between the democrats and the monarchy. Today, it is between the republican democrats and the ‘people’s republicans’ represented by the Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist).

Some wish for a grand leader, a Lee Kuan Yew or a Nelson Mandela, to emerge to set things right for the people. But no shelf in a supermarket sells the kind of leader Nepal needs, specific to its condition and needs. The country is constructed in such a way that only a pluralistic society with competing political parties and an alert civil society can create the conditions for social and economic upliftment. When the country achieves a democratic peace, or a peaceful democracy, governance will be transparent and the political competition will be conducted within the limits of certain values and decorum. Then, and only then, will Nepal begin to produce all the electricity it needs and more for export.

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