Sanjay Sharma “Khetaarey”
Every winter, for some years now, Nepalis are forced to spend ‘powerless’ days. We have already witnessed a torturous power-cut of 18 hours per day some three years ago. Continuing that trend, the Nepal Electricity Authority (NEA) has brought out new load shedding schedule effective from January 16, 2012. As per the new schedule, the NEA will not transmit ‘power’ 88 hours a week, averaging just less than 13 hours a day. This is the highest ‘powerless’ period till now this year. I argue here that for household consumption (including in day-shift offices and other institutions), least of these 11 (24 minus 13) hours of daily transmission is used; and that most of a household’s productive time is exposed to ‘powerless’ hours.
Though the power-cut off varies at different places, it is for sure that any of the seven designated geographical groups suffers, as per the new schedule, 14 ‘powerless’ hours for 2 days, 13 such hours for 2 day, 12 hours for 1 day, and finally 11 hours for the rest couple of days in any given week. The cyclic format of the load shedding schedule makes sure that the seven days of the week are rotated in those seven groups. Except these hours when there is no ‘power’ for sure, there are irregular ‘powerless’ hours where one should be ready with ‘power’ backups in the forms of inverters, solar powered lights, candles, kerosene lamps, or else.
As I have mentioned earlier, the load shedding period is 88 hours per week; but the reality is somewhat no so straight. Let’s take an example. A typical Nepali middle class urbanite has a normal sleeping period of 7 hours a day, for which she sleeps at, say, 11 in the night and gets up at, say again, 6 in the morning. If this is her daily sleeping routine, she would not have ‘power’ for lot more than just 88 hours. Of the 168 hours that are in a week (24 hours multiplied by 7 days), she can witness ‘power’ for only 44 hours a week; the rest 124 hours are ‘powerless’ for her. Let’s do some mathematical calculations here. Sleeping 7 hours a day, 11 pm to 6 am, lets her witness ‘power’ for 5 hours for 3 days, 7 hours for the next 3 days and 8 hours for the last one day of a typical week. That makes a total of 44 hours a week with ‘power’; meaning, just more than 6 hours a day in an average.
Further, if you are an office going person and have to work on/with electronic devices for 8 hours a day in the office from 9 am to 5 pm, the situation is further worse. If there is no system of ‘power’ backup in your office, even if you go to office 7 days a week, you could barely have NEA’s electricity for just 24 hours a week, i.e. 5 hours a day, 4 hours for 4 days, and 2 hours and 1 hour each for the next 2 days (assuming that you are working seven days a week, 9 am to 5 pm). Again, in an average, that makes just more than 3 hours per day of ‘power’ in the office hours.
So basically, what the argument is, if you cannot afford to have ‘power’ backups, your life as an urbanite could be a mess. You could not expect to work in the office, cook food, study/read for some time in the night, watch TV, listen to radio, have water running in your bathroom and kitchen, or even fully charge your laptops and mobile phones. To make the use of you electronic devices, you need to adjust your sleeping and working schedule. In other words, your daily routine has to be guided by the load shedding schedule so that you could catch up with your daily activities. You have to sleep very late in the evening when there is light and get up very early the other day to make use of the mornings when NEA transmits ‘power’. You have to fix an alarm at 12 midnight to pump up the water in your storage tank. You have to go to the office at odd times, literally ‘haunting’ electricity.
Further, with a view of benefitting the household consumption, the NEA would have to reshuffle the load shedding time targeting the transmission of electricity during the productive time period of the households; a couple of hours during the mornings and evenings. There is no direct use of ‘power’ when you are sleeping. The schedule is like: you need electricity to go pee in the middle of the night and do not need it when you are bathing and find that the water storage tank has gone empty. Therefore, by transmitting the ‘power’ to various industries, night shift offices, publication houses and similar institution during the night, where there is workload during that period, the NEA would have to give maximum possible ‘power’ to the households during the period when the households could make use of it. People could make use of their electronic devices to make their lives easier then, they could study/read, working people could work, and be productive than setting up an alarm at midnight to iron your clothes because your load shedding schedule says you have no ‘power’ from as early as 5 that evening. At least two hours of daily transmission during the mornings and evenings in the households, and similar period of transmission in the daytime would waive a lot of tensions from the head of an urban dweller. Think scientifically NEA!
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