DHAKA: It is twilight and Dhaka’s glitzy, neon-lit shopping centres stand out like beacons in the gloom. This is the busiest time of day but soon every shop will fall dark as part of a new government policy to divert power to the most needy.

Within 20 minutes the lights will be out, the shutters down, and shopkeepers like Amir Hossen will be on their way home reflecting ruefully on their recent 50 per cent drop in takings.

It’s not that retailers don’t sympathise with the rural farmers benefiting from the interim government’s decision to help tackle the nation’s power crisis by banning shops from opening after 7pm.

In fact, Hossen – though concerned about his own losses – thinks it right that electricity should be diverted from cities to help struggling farmers irrigate their land.

“We support this policy for the sake of the farmers although we would like to have the closing time extended to 8pm,” he said.

Since the ban was first imposed in late February, Hossen’s takings have dropped by half.

But he says he believes the losses are temporary, adding that business has started to pick up during the normally slack afternoons.

North of the capital in Bangladesh’s rural heartland is where the government wants the benefit of the new policy to be felt.

Here, farmers have become used to receiving power for only a few hours a day, if at all.

Last year, however, their frustration boiled over in a series of violent protests in the northern village of Kansat in which at least 18 people died.

Thousands of farmers brandishing sticks and machetes vented years of pent-up fury by marching through the streets and laying siege to the local police station.

Officers, fearing for their lives, fired tear gas, rubber bullets and live ammunition and at least five officers were seriously injured including one who had his leg severed with a machete.

The following month Power Minister Iqbal Hasan Mahmud told reporters it would take at least three years to ease the yawning shortfall in supply and demand fuelled by five per cent annual growth since the early 1990s.

He was promptly removed from his job. Four months later his replacement was fired too.

Experts say far-reaching plans are needed to tackle the nation’s power crisis.

“The last government sat over this problem for five years and did nothing. Cutting power to shops is a short term solution,” said Moinul Islam, professor of economics at the south-eastern Chittagong University.

“This interim government needs to also come up with medium and long-term solutions,” he said.

The World Bank has put Bangladesh’s power shortfall at 700 to 800 megawatts a day rising to 2,000 megawatts when ageing plants are shut for maintenance.

It says at least $10 billion in investment is needed over the next decade to tackle the problem.

Islam blamed corruption for the failure of power generation projects under the last government led by the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP).

“The last government was minting money out of the projects to generate electricity and none of them came to fruition because they could not agree with their partners on who would earn what,” he said.

In 2005, Bangladesh was named the most corrupt nation in the world for the fifth year running by international graft watchdog Transparency International.—AFP