Kathmandu, Mar. 17 - At a time when the country is reeling under energy crisis, the Finance Ministry is preparing to turn the allocated but unused development budget toward projects for alleviating power-cut.
"We proposed for investing the allocated but unused development expenditure on energy sector so that the power crunch will lessen next year," Dr. Baburam Bhattarai, Finance Minister, said after an inter-ministry meeting on ways for tackling with the power-cut.
He said that the government was planning to set up thermal plants with a capacity of generating 250 MW and import some 500 MW electricity from India.
When asked about disagreement of coalition partners on setting up of thermal plant, he said, "We cannot let darkness prevail in the county when we have resources to arrange for immediate solution to the power shortage. I have been repeatedly urging the other ministries for coming up with development projects to utilise the allocated budget, but they have failed to do so."
Dr. Bhattarai blamed the previous governments for the present power crisis saying, "They generated only 39MW of electricity when they had planned to produce 300MW."
He said that the budget that remains from the development budget would be used for providing the people with other relief measures.
According to Minister for Water Resources, Bishnu Paudel, the meeting held at the Prime Minister’s office in Singha Durbar was focused on evaluation of implementation of the 35 point programme to face with power crunch.
"As the PM wanted to know about the implementation aspect of the 35-point action plan to deal with energy crisis, we briefed him about the implementation which he found satisfactory," Minister Paudel said after the meeting.
He, however, denied there was any discussion on thermal plants.
http://gorkhapatra.org.np/rising.detail.php?article_id=15881&cat_id=4
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