Life under a blanket of darkness
According to The Financial Express :
Life without electricity is unthinkable. Specially, having electricity withdrawn from your life after you have become habituated to it, the same is even more unthinkable. But life without electricity continues to be the fate of millions of Bangladeshis after they have had electricity regularly supplied to them ever since they took connections.
Cooling fans do not whir overhead during scorching summer days, foods in refrigerators rot from long periods of power turn-offs, the young ones cannot study in peace either in day time or at night from electricity's non availability, motors cannot be run to lift water to overhand tanks in households and even water supply gets badly disrupted from water producing power pumps of WASA not functioning.
Thus, quality of life and living has been too wretched for a very large number of countrymen. The sufferings described above are not in the category of direct economic losses or production losses. But the same have turned life into one of unending torments for a great many number of people.
And the economic losses are too obvious. According to a recent report of the Asian Development Bank (ADB) , 64 per cent of industries of different types in Bangladesh have become heavily dependent on generators. This compares with 25 per cent in India and 2 or 3 per cent in Thailand and China. Thus, from having to produce their own power expensively, Bangladeshi industries have seriously eroded their competitiveness. If it keeps on like this, many could go out of business fairly soon and potential entrepreneurs will hold back from materialising their plans out of a concern that they would have no electricity to run their newly established industries.
It is now an indisputable fact that the outgoing government has presided over conditions over the last five years when hardly no additional electricity was produced and added to the national grid when the demand for it has been increasing by about 500 mw every year. Thus, a shortfall of about 2,000 mw of power has been created which is creating severe stresses for the economy and normal life and living . In paper, of course, the government has added an additional 640 mw to the grid. But in reality, the new generation capacities have remained dysfunctional for the greater period of time since their commissioning.
The newly established Tongi power plant, for example, tripped over a hundred times since it was made operational last year and every time it took days to resume operation. The additional 640 mw of electricity, therefore, has been more fiction than fact. Besides, many of the older electricity generating plants have been going out of operation for long periods requiring frequent repairs. Practically, therefore, less electricity has been produced by this government than the amount that was being produced when they took charge.
Things would not be so bad if massive corruption had not been afflicting the power sector. Only some months ago, a state minister who resigned to admit his inability to put things right in this sector, disclosed that a sum of Taka 20 billion was simply misappropriated by the officials of the Dhaka Electricity Supply Authorities (DESA) in the span of a few years.
No records of spending purposes of this amount are available in DESA's accounts department. More than Taka 150 billion has been shown spent for various works in the sector and a lot of it went for repairs and overhauling activities. If the money was well spent, then such frequent going out of order of the electricity generating units would not be experienced. Allegedly , the Taka 150 billion was mainly misappropriated by corrupt officials.
For example, Taka 1.7 billion was shown as the repairing cost of a small power plant when with this amount of money a new plant could be set up. In most cases, the money provisioned for repairs was stolen. In some cases, the plants were only painted and the painting job was shown in the account books as repairs.
There could be not be a worse case of corruption than uselessly building capacities for transmission when existing electricity generating units remained out of order and no new generating units were being set up. It was a case of putting the cart before the horse. What was the use of building thousands of kilometers of new transmission lines when even existing power users could not be kept even reasonably supplied with electricity ?
According to reports, 69,686 km long transmission lines have been set up mainly in the rural areas. But electricity does not flow through these lines as there is not enough electricity available for the purpose. What then was the motivation for setting up these transmission lines-- destined to be useless-- at a cost of over 70 billion Taka ?
It was no other than whetting the appetite of vested groups who could rake in fantastic sums of money by excess billing the government for the supply of poles and other paraphernalia required for laying the transmission lines. If the 70 billion Taka was utilised for the establishment of new power generating units, what a difference for the better it would be for power users across the country.
Experts are fearing that as a consequence of these extreme mismanagement, thievery and corruptions, the woes of electricity users are going to be even worse in the next summer season. The coming of winter-- when the demand for electricity dips somewhat-- will provide a temporary reprieve . But the torments are likely to reappear in more formidable forms in the next summer season with the shortfall of electricity rising to nearly 3,000 mw.
Therefore, power generation must be at the top of the agenda of whoever rules Bangladesh next. Power generation will absolutely have to be given highest priority. If there is an election, then the political parties must be pushed hard to state in their election manifestos that increasing power generation at the fastest would be their main economic goal on going to power and to spell out in details and clear terms how they would realise their plans to this end.
See Also :
Bangladesh : Deepening power crisis
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