Visionary power plans

I was heartened to see the news “Power trade with India” (TDS, Mar. 7) and the vision of the AL government in generating power supply for Bangladesh by 2030. I use the word 'vision' because in my fairly long life time, I have seldom seen any government taking a long-term vision for Bangladesh – at best it had always been a maximum of 5 years time.

The AL government is sometimes criticised by some for being quite autocratic at times, but in this case its leadership at least is trying to set some vision and taking some steps to reach their targets. I can well remember when the AL government took power in 2009; the baseline power generation was a little more than 4000 MW.

Now it has gone up to more than 10,000 MW in 6 years time. And by 2030 the vision for generating power has been set as 39,000 MW. I am happy with the vision not because of the amount of MW but because of the shift in production plan. By that time as per the vision, Bangladesh will drastically switch to electricity generation based mainly on coal and nuclear power and joint collaboration with India, Nepal, Bhutan and Myanmar.

If it happens a huge amount of subsidy for quick rental plants will be reduced and the budget allocation for electricity subsidy could be utilised for development purposes.

Shazzad Khan
Gulshan-2, Dhaka