For three weeks now, I have been reading about the situation in the Terai. Perhaps it has even made international news at this point, so you may have also read about it. Minority groups have been violently protesting there because they feel that the new interim constitution, which was agreed upon by major political parties about a month ago, is unjust and does not serve their interests.
Anyway, the Terai region is in the South of the country, bordering India. One of its main resources happens to be gas (both petrol for vehicles and gas for cooking and taking showers). Because of the violence, it’s been almost impossible to export the gas from that region to the rest of Nepal.
I was wondering why my showers had been brutally cold for the last week.
There are four regions in the Terai that pump out gas, and three of them are not supplying any at the moment. That means that the entire country of Nepal is depending on the gas production of one pump.
Last weekend I took a bus into Mahendra Pul (the main market in Pokhara). On the way, I saw a huge (and I mean huge) line of people waiting for petrol. I figured that people had to wait for over an hour to fill their tanks. Can you imagine?
But the situation is actually worse than that – because once an individual finally reaches the head of the line, he only gets 5 liters if he’s a car, and only 2 liters if he’s a motorcycle.
People are lining up at 5am to get their gas, and finally emerging close to lunch time… with what? 2 or 5 liters. Can you even imagine the chaos that would cause in the gas-obsessed West?
People aren’t happy about it here, either, but what can they do? They’re kind of used to it by now – we also only get 21 hours of electricity each day (soon to be 18 hours a day). And water supply is down too – like way down. That’s the reason behind the electricity shortage, if you recall from one of my previous entries. But I’m not just talking about power-producing water. I’m talking about drinking water. Availability of drinking water has nearly halved in Nepal compared to its maximum production. Because of the frequent power cuts, workers aren’t able to extract enough groundwater.It’s a game of the chicken and the egg. We don’t have enough fresh water to produce enough power, and we don’t have enough power to extract enough water…
Nepal usually begins to lack water by April or May, before the monsoon season starts. But the fact that they are already feeling the lack of water in February is worrisome. And the situation is unlikely to resolve itself because in one week, power cuts are doubling –which means that for 6 hours each day (instead of only 3) workers won’t be able to extract groundwater.
Powerless To Stop It
