WHEN the sun set behind the moun¬tains in the village of Benighat in Central Nepal, Bishnu Shrestha used to board up his store and go home to bed. Today, Bishnu´s store is lit up by a bright neon tube, and is open late. Even villagers from the far valley have come around – attracted to the shop like die moths that flap around the light.
Elsewhere in Benighat, children read their school books after their evening meals in the soft glow of 25 watt bulbs, and the whirr from a nearby house indicates the village tailor is working late. It has taken ´a long time for the dream of rural electrification to be realised in villages like Benighat. But the light of development is turning into a feeble dawn, here and elsewhere in the Nepali mountains.
With a total feasible hydropower potential topping 30,000 megawatts, Nepal´s fast-flowing Himalayan rivers have often been called its "white gold". But only 0.05 percent of this wealth has so far been harnessed. Government plans to spread the use of cheap electricity across the Himlayan hinterland to replace firewood for cooking and to reduce the pressure on dwindling forests have been slow to catch on. Only 30 of Nepal´s 75 districts have some electricity, and Kathmandu´s plans to build big dams like the six billion dollar Chisapani Project in Western Nepal have got bogged down in cost-sharing disagreements with India. Officials in Kathmandu argue that Nepal needs to "think big" because the only way it can clear its adverse trade deficit with India in the immediate future is by selling water and power to its southern neighbour.
Meanwhile, most Nepali villages continue to slumber in darkness. "A viable alternative to building large dams is to use technology available in the country and to develop new designs for smaller affordable power plants," says Bikash Pandey, an electrical engineer with the Butwal-based Development and Consulting Services (DCS).