Deepesh Aryal and two of his restaurant staff set out in the dead of night and brave Kathmandu’s biting wintry chill to meet a carefully cultivated contact.
As they count their cash, they could be planning a drug deal or a cloak-and-dagger meeting of spies — but the truth is rather more prosaic: they are joining a 10-hour line for cooking gas.
Like thousands of traders in Kathmandu, 28-year-old Aryal will go to extraordinary lengths to secure the fuel he needs to run his business amid an energy crisis that is crippling life in the impoverished nation.
He is forced to line up for the best part of a day and, after his 4am start, he finally has three full cylinders of cooking gas.
However, they will run out and soon he will have to repeat the arduous trip.
“I had to wait until 2pm to get the cylinders filled,” Aryal said. “I was lucky because I knew the gas dealer. Imagine how hard it is for people without connections.”
A severe shortage of gas cylinders, essential for heating and cooking in a country with no mains supply, has increased the hardship for Nepalese already enduring seasonal daily power cuts of up to 14 hours.
Exacerbating the problem, a shortage of gas and diesel means people have to line up for many hours or turn to the black market to run cars and the generators that light their shops when the electricity goes out.
The crisis has led to angry criticism of the government and even civil unrest, with protests stopping traffic and citizens resorting to criminality to get hold of fuel.
Earlier this month a group of Nepalese stopped delivery trucks carrying gas on a busy highway and distributed the cylinders among themselves.
The deprivations and sacrifices of the fuel crisis can be seen in every corner of Kathmandu.
Students have raided gas depots, lines of cars and motorcycles snake back hundreds of meters from gas stations, fuel trucks require police escorts and restaurants have reduced menus in an effort to save on gas.
Taxi driver Jagaran Tamang, 22, says he is forced to spend half his day lining up for fuel and is even considering moving to South Korea for temporary work.
“These days, I drive to a gas station and wait in line for more than five hours. During that time, I could have ferried half a dozen passengers,” he said. “It has become hard to survive.”
The factors blamed for the crisis are complex, but years of political paralysis following the 1996 to 2006 Maoist insurgency have not helped.
Experts say Nepal’s huge mountain river system could be generating up to 83,000 megawatts of power, allowing it to sell surplus electricity to other countries.
However, development of infrastructure ground to a halt during the civil war and the nation currently produces just 688 megawatts a year.
As a result, it has to import petroleum products worth 80 billion rupees (US$1 billion) a year.
The government-run Nepal Oil Corp, which provides subsidized fuel to consumers, has fallen behind on its payments to India and last month the company raised gas and diesel prices, leading to angry protests.
Demonstrators blocked traffic and shut shops across the country, withdrawing only after Nepalese Prime Minister Baburam Bhattarai pledged to address their demands.
The government has since given the company 2 billion rupees (US$25.4 million) to pay off the Indian Oil Corporation, but the crisis continues unabated.
Energy analyst Amrit Nakarmi described the fuel shortages as an “artificially created crisis” caused by the government’s failure to institute a pricing structure based on demand and world prices.
“The government has arbitrarily increased the price of petroleum products. It does not want to manage the [fuel supply] properly, but neither does it want to privatize, which has exacerbated the problem,” he said. “Our dependence on fossil fuel is increasing each passing day with the increase in population and the development of small urban areas where consumers prefer cooking gas. The crisis will be more frequent in coming years.”
Swedish campaigner Greta Thunberg was deported from Israel yesterday, the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs said, the day after the Israeli navy prevented her and a group of fellow pro-Palestinian activists from sailing to Gaza. Thunberg, 22, was put on a flight to France, the ministry said, adding that she would travel on to Sweden from there. Three other people who had been aboard the charity vessel also agreed to immediate repatriation. Eight other crew members are contesting their deportation order, Israeli rights group Adalah, which advised them, said in a statement. They are being held at a detention center ahead of a
A Chinese scientist was arrested while arriving in the US at Detroit airport, the second case in days involving the alleged smuggling of biological material, authorities said on Monday. The scientist is accused of shipping biological material months ago to staff at a laboratory at the University of Michigan. The FBI, in a court filing, described it as material related to certain worms and requires a government permit. “The guidelines for importing biological materials into the US for research purposes are stringent, but clear, and actions like this undermine the legitimate work of other visiting scholars,” said John Nowak, who leads field
Former Nicaraguan president Violeta Chamorro, who brought peace to Nicaragua after years of war and was the first woman elected president in the Americas, died on Saturday at the age of 95, her family said. Chamorro, who ruled the poor Central American country from 1990 to 1997, “died in peace, surrounded by the affection and love of her children,” said a statement issued by her four children. As president, Chamorro ended a civil war that had raged for much of the 1980s as US-backed rebels known as the “Contras” fought the leftist Sandinista government. That conflict made Nicaragua one of
NUCLEAR WARNING: Elites are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers, perhaps because they have access to shelters, Tulsi Gabbard said After a trip to Hiroshima, US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard on Tuesday warned that “warmongers” were pushing the world to the brink of nuclear war. Gabbard did not specify her concerns. Gabbard posted on social media a video of grisly footage from the world’s first nuclear attack and of her staring reflectively at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial. On Aug. 6, 1945, the US obliterated Hiroshima, killing 140,000 people in the explosion and by the end of the year from the uranium bomb’s effects. Three days later, a US plane dropped a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki, leaving abut 74,000 people dead by the
RSS