16-year-old Dikshya Devkota struggles to see her homework in the candlelight.
Like everyone else this winter, she has to cope with severe electricity cuts of up to 12 hours a day.
“The light goes off suddenly when I am concentrating on my studies. It disturbs my thinking.”
And this is the time when she needs to be able to think...
Dikshya is about to sit her graduation exam.
There should be computer classes at her school, but they can’t turn them on.
Tulsiram Dhakal, a teacher at the Ratna Rajya Higher Secondary School, says there’s no power.
“Because of load shedding I haven’t been able to teach a single class properly today. It’s so difficult to manage.”
Nepal only produces about half of its electricity needs, despite its massive hydropower potential.
The spokesperson of the Nepal Electricity Authority, Sher Singh Bhat, says the lack of power is particularly bad in winter.
“In winter time the water in the rivers is very low. The snow doesn’t melt and there is low rainfall. There is a severe imbalance between demand and supply in winter and the dry seasons in the months of February and March.“
Only 40% of people in Nepal are even connected to the electricity grid.
But in urban areas people are used to having power on demand.
And Dikshya’s grandmother Liladevi Devkota is frustrated with having to live without electricity for so long.
“There is no light when we are eating, when we are cooking. We have to cook everything by gas and I get so angry, and when the power goes off when we are eating, it upsets me a lot.”
The government is planning to build a number of new hydropower plants.
But construction has been slow.
Student Dikshya believes people also need to do their bit to save energy.
“We shouldn’t switch on lights during the day and shouldn’t leave them on throughout the night, but use them only when we need to. And we should switch off the lights when we’re not using them.”
For now Nepal is a dark country – where the rich are buying generators and the poor are having to adjust their schedules to work around the power cuts.
