ELECTRICITY CRISIS

Peace is the world’s need, nation’s need, school’s need and family’s need. Peace is felt, realized and further demanded. The demand is for the sake of any kinds of progress. Any kinds of violence are not liked by peace wishers because man cannot have peace of his mind so he cannot make any decisions for progress. Provisions are possible only in peaceful environment.

Nepal has suffered from violence for nearly 15 years and still people are under pressure of violence, strikes, kidnapping etc. Since the time (2006), Nepal’s government and the communist  party of Nepal (Maoist) signed a comprehensive peace agreement to formally and their conflict , peace process has been remarkably prospered. The agreement has been widely regarded as historic and many observers of the agreement and also of the other agreements that have been made afterwards are still much optimistic, in spite of the hurdles that lie ahead.

United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has expressed UN’s readiness to provide any kind of help upon the request of Nepali people. All parties together, under UN supervision, have successfully arranged the elections of the Constituent assembly, and also ended the Monarchy system with unanimous decision. Now they are moving ahead to prepare a new constitution. All know well that the peace process is moving in right direction.

Having the government under the leadership of Maoist party first after the revolution, and now having the government changed, people have now doubt that the peace agreement will succeed, because the Maoist party has been isolated. I think Nepal has still problem. We are still feeling uneasy thinking about the real peace, dreamed so far by the people. Peace is required for the nation’s integration. We can just have a hope!

ELECTRICITY CRISIS

Nepal is facing severe electricity crisis due to supply constraint and it has already been forecast that the load shedding is here to stay in the increasing magnitude. In the past, Nepal Electricity Authority(NEA) used to trot the excuse of no water in rivers whenever it came up with a new load shedding schedule or made changes in them resulting in the increased hours of load shedding. However, this rainy season, even in the abundance of water, NEA imposed a load shedding of  2 hours each day, two days a week even in August.

         In Nepal, Hydropower was historically been seen as the priority. It is still considered to have enormous potential, but after more than a century- from 1900 when the pharping power plant with 500 KW installed capacity was established development has been extraordinarily slow. At present hydropower still meets only two percent of the total energy need, and only some 40 percent of the total population has access to electricity. It is also the case that such hydropower plants as do exist has mainly catered to the electricity needs of the urban or semi-urban areas according to the authorized body of NEA.