New Delhi, Sep 16 (IANS) The flash flood that tore down the Lhende Khola, the Bhotekoshi and the Trishuli rivers on August 26 has damaged hydropower plants in Nepal, forcing the Himalayan country, which was an exporter of electricity, to become dependent on India to stave off the acute power crisis, according to a new report.
India’s Ministry of Power has now approved the export of up to 654 megawatts to the Nepal Electricity Authority from September 13 through December 31, for 18 hours a day, from midnight to six in the evening. This will help Nepal to keep hospitals, cold stores, water pumps and the evening peak from becoming a second disaster, according to an article in India Narrative.
With several power plants damaged or isolated, Nepal’s request to India was an operational one, and it was granted earlier than the usual October window for winter imports.
India approved the flow while its own September demand was unusually high — peak load near 269 GW, non-solar hours still short — and while El Nino and a patchy monsoon were squeezing its own hydro and wind, states the article.
The government’s rapid assessment put energy-sector physical damage due to the flash floods at Rs 134.69 billion (Nepalese rupee) and the bill for restoring generation and the grid far higher. Hundreds of hydropower workers remain among the missing. The rivers that were supposed to underwrite Nepal’s export earnings became, for a morning, a wall of ice, rock and water, the article laments.
Devighat and the original Trishuli station are not just any power plants. They were built with Indian grant assistance — Trishuli under the 1958 agreement, commissioned in the late 1960s: Devighat as its cascade in the mid-1980s, along with smaller gifts such as Phewa and the Kataiya house on the Koshi canal.
When Nepal first stepped onto the Indian Energy Exchange as a seller in November 2021, the first blocks approved for export were 39 MW from those same two stations. The current that once arrived as aid left, decades later, as a traded commodity. This month the current is coming the other way again, over the same family of lines, because the river that fed those machines has been brutal to them.
The days after August 26 were not only about megawatts. The first Indian Air Force flight left Hindon the same evening the flood struck, after a call between the two prime ministers, with about ten tonnes of shelters, blankets, hygiene kits, lamps and medicines. Further sorties and consignments followed — tens of tonnes in all — along with tunnel-rescue specialists to work with the Nepali Army at blocked hydropower audits, forensic teams for identification, and equipment for modular and Bailey bridges where the road had simply ceased to exist, the article states.
“Other countries sent help too; gratitude is not a scarce resource and should not be monopolised. But the first response is a habit, and habits show. In April 2015, after the Gorkha earthquake, that habit had a name — Operation Maitri — and it arrived within hours: NDRF teams, aircraft, field hospitals, and later a reconstruction pledge that included houses in Gorkha and Nuwakot, schools and heritage sites. After Jajarkot in 2023 and the September 2024 rains, the pattern was smaller but the same: material on the ground before the condolence statements had cooled. None of these erases the harder chapters of the relationship. It does describe what happens when the ground moves,” the article further states.
–IANS
sps/na