Some districts outside Dhaka still endure daily losses of electricity with up to two to six hours of load-shedding every day.
The economic consequences of this make it more important than ever for the government to speed up progress on increasing power generation capacity in Bangladesh.
Load-shedding not only impacts adversely on daily life, but is a major factor preventing businesses from setting up factories outside the capital.
Factories often cannot run profitably in locations where they are forced to run expensive back up diesel generators for several hours each day. It is for this reason that so many multi-storey factories have been built in Dhaka.
It is quite inefficient that in a city like Dhaka, where land is scarce and therefore costly, more factories are having to be set up, instead of at locations with cheaper land, simply due to the lack of reliable electricity in other districts. This problem will not be fixed until the government has fully addressed the electricity crisis.
Providing subsidies for fuel and electricity is both a burden on public funds and inefficient. The government needs to consider ending them.
In the meantime, it must ensure that income from the recently agreed electricity price rise is used to help build more power stations so that load-shedding is ended everywhere. That way, the load can be taken off Dhaka and more economic opportunities can be opened up in other areas, for the benefit of everyone.
