The Bhutanese Leading the way.
In this turn of century a day without electricity is bad enough but it’s virtually a near-pandemonium state-of-affairs if it prolongs for a full day or even half a day.
And this currently is the exact circumstances which people of Trashiyangtse are put through on a regular basis. The Dzongkhag is without power towards the evening and sometimes it lasts for the whole day or sometimes for the whole night.
People say power failures and fluctuations is all too often in the place and at one point of time it lasted for more than two weeks and just recently the dzongkhag didn’t have power for almost a week.
The problem is frequent during monsoon seasons due to heavy rain where a sub-station was washed away.
A teacher of Khamdang Lower Secondary School under Trashiyangtse Dzongkhag said for five days from now they had to stay without electricity due to the erratic power supply. Things return to normalcy, of sorts after 6 pm.
He said “since all the work has to be done during day time, we have to wait till evening for the question papers to get printed”.
However, he said, “today there was current all day long and don’t know whether it would continue till evening”.
The school with 335 students and 12 teaching staffs starts examinations from 21 November.
Likewise in Khamdang gewog, Gup Gempo said, much beforehand the Bhutan Power Corporation (BPC) notified that there would be power fluctuations during which electricity would be on and off due to maintenance works.
He said due to the power failures “most of the paper works do remain pending and we have to wait for electricity to commence our daily work”.
The people of Khamdang who used to watch Bhutan Broadcasting Service (BBS) channel are cut-off from watching the channel for a month now.
For two years, the people could watch BBS through Dish Television which was provided by the UNDP.
“With the absence of the source of information which keeps the community updated on developments we are now out of touch with news,” he said.
Moreover he said BPC notification was given in BBS channel and because of improper channel the village and gewog residents could not be updated about the BPC notifications and only heard it verbally from friends.
“We don’t really get to know what is happening these days,” Gup Gempo said.
The tower is presently under repair, said the gup and soon people can go back to normal routines. “We may get to watch BBS channel and we are excited to watch the new channel, BBS2 as well,” he said.
The gewog is about 33 kms away from the Dzongkhag and has around 650 households.
