Nepal’s state-run power monopoly increased daily power cuts to 16 hours from 12 hours yesterday because growing demand for electricity in winter was putting further strain on generating capacity, an official said.
The Nepal Electricity Authority (NEA) has been imposing 12 hours of daily power cuts, saying generation of hydro-electric power had fallen because of the slow melting of mountain snows.
Senior NEA official Sher Singh Bhat said an earlier plan to increase power outages from next month was brought forward because river levels were falling “very fast” and power demand was rising in winter.
NEA generates 300 megawatts (MW) of electricity against demand of 800 MW, which is rising by 10 percent every year.
“The situation could ease a little bit in the summer, but the power cuts are here to stay for another five to six years,” he said, adding no major hydro-electric plant was set to start generating power before then.
Nepal’s ruling Maoists say the crisis was due to the failure of previous governments to build new power stations on time.
No major hydroelectric plants were built in the past decade because of poor security during a decade-long Maoist insurgency, which ended two years ago.
During the revolt, insurgents attacked infrastructure such as power facilities, scaring investors away.
Industries and businesses say the power cuts have reduced output and will hit economic growth as industries were running on less than 20 percent of their capacity.
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed his pledge to replace India’s religion-based marriage and inheritance laws with a uniform civil code if he returns to office for a third term, a move that some minority groups have opposed. In an interview with the Times of India listing his agenda, Modi said his government would push for making the code a reality. “It is clear that separate laws for communities are detrimental to the health of society,” he said in the interview published yesterday. “We cannot be a nation where one community is progressing with the support of the Constitution while the other
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the
CODIFYING DISCRIMINATION: Transgender people would be sentenced to three years in prison, while same-sex relations could land a person in jail for more than a decade Iraq’s parliament on Saturday passed a bill criminalizing same-sex relations, which would receive a sentence of up to 15 years in prison, in a move rights groups condemned as an “attack on human rights.” Transgender people would be sentenced to three years’ jail under the amendments to a 1988 anti-prostitution law, which were adopted during a session attended by 170 of 329 lawmakers. A previous draft had proposed capital punishment for same-sex relations, in what campaigners had called a “dangerous” escalation. The new amendments enable courts to sentence people engaging in same-sex relations to 10 to 15 years in prison, according to the