The meeting of the Nepal-India Energy Secretary-Level Joint Steering Committee began in Kathmandu on Wednesday to discuss power trade between the two countries and construction of the required infrastructure as well as policy-level challenges.

Although the committee was to meet every six months, the last time officials of the two sides met in-person was two years ago in Bangalore, India, although it had met virtually last year due to the coronavirus pandemic. For decades, Nepal has harped on exporting power to India. Instead, it had to rely on imported power to meet the huge deficit between demand and power generation, with even the capital seeing power outages lasting up to 18 hours daily. But with the addition of the 456-MW Upper Tamakoshi Hydropower Project and other private sector undertakings, Nepal is not only in a position to export power to India, but could also see large amounts of electricity go to waste during the monsoon season if it is unable to export the surplus.

Power exports to India in recent months have been feasible following the Power Trade Agreement reached between the two countries in October 2014, making Nepal the first country in South Asia to participate in the Indian energy exchange market. However, India has given approval for the purchase of electricity - a total of just 39 MW - from only two power projects that were built with Indian assistance in the past as it puts a ban on purchasing power produced or distributed from investment made by a third country. At the energy meet, Nepal is thus trying to push for the export of 850-MW of power from the coming monsoon. Merely generating large amounts of power, however, cannot guarantee their export to either India or Bangladesh. Nepal sorely lacks transmission lines capable of evacuating more than 1,000- MW of electricity. Currently, there is just one transmission line of 400 KV - the Dhalkebar-Muzaffarpur transmission line - for cross-border power trade with India. Nepal's second double-circuit 400 KV cross-border transmission line, which will link Butwal with Gorakhpur in India, will extend 315 km in the central part of the country. However, the transmission line together with a road upgradation project, to be built with a $500 million grant under the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) agreement with the United States, is facing opposition from the communist parties, and their fate is to be decided by the parliament by February-end.

At present, energy exports to India could help narrow the huge trade deficit with India to some extent. Nepal's exports to India in the first seven months of this fiscal were worth Rs 106.36 billion while imports from the southern neighbor were more than six times that amount. With big power projects nearing completion soon, Nepal and India must cooperate to put the necessary infrastructure in place not only to export to India but also to Bangladesh, which has shown interest in buying 500-MW of power from the Karnali project being built by an Indian company.

But given the hurdles seen in exporting power, Nepal must think of ways to increase energy consumption in the country itself, from luring investments in energy-intensive industries to promoting electric vehicles and switching to induction heaters.

Archeological potential

Nepal has received a preliminary report of the geophysical survey conducted at archeological sites of Panchkhal Municipality by a joint team of experts from the Department of Archeology (DoA) and UK's Durham University. Details of the survey report will be released in a month, as per the DoA. The DoA officials said they have found immense potentiality of historic heritages at seven selected areas of the municipality during the survey. An eight-member team from the university had arrived in Nepal to conduct a survey of various heritage sties of the country, including Panchkhal in March last year.

The Panchkhal Valley is considered to be one of the oldest settlements, where ancient archeological sites with historical importance are believed to be buried underground. However, rapid urbanisation and haphazard construction of roads and other infrastructures might have destroyed them. We will be able to know exactly about our history and culture once we unearth the potential archeological sites. Learning lessons from Mustang, where the locals recently prevented researchers from carrying out a survey of archeological sites, the researchers must take the locals into confidence before they start excavation works.

A version of this article appears in the print on February 24, 2022, of The Himalayan Times.