Epilogue (Re-imagining Nepal’s Water: Institutional Blind Spots, Developmental Blind Alleys and the Lessons of the Century Past)

It is indeed ironical that this epilogue – to a book whose contributors are all senior figures of Nepal’s water and energy establishment – is being composed by hand because of power cuts. A country that has long boasted being one of the richest in the world in hydroelectric power potential is reeling under eight hours of daily load shedding in the month of March 2008. Such officially announced and enforced blackouts are, however, not new: they have, like the yearly seasons, regularly followed the commissioning of new hydroelectric plants. A few years of excess capacity have inevitably been followed by several years of shortages in the national grid since the 1970s. The story of scarcity amidst the plenty so frequently propagandised in the media repeats itself in other subsectors of domestic water supply and irrigation as well. Is there a rational explanation, a method to this madness?