Hidden behind a mini-mountain of livestock manure, Malati Chaudhary scooped up a portion of buffalo dung using her bare hands and mixed it with hay. She measured the meter-long dung cake with a stick and added more hay as her husband, Bishwa Nath Chaudhary, towered over her. She deftly inserted three-four twigs in to the elongated piece, molding it into a slender pillar of solid fuel. She rose after giving it a finishing touch and carried it off for a few steps. The 36-year-old placed it over a row of dung portions, letting it dry in the sun, which was setting in the village of Jamuwad in Nawalparasi district.The Chaudharys, indigenous people of Tharu community living in the southern plains, were stockpiling precious solid fuel for summer, the farming family's busiest season of the year. The nine-member family that lives in an unfinished and unfurnished one-story cement and concrete home by a highway, was continuing a tradition that dated several centuries back.
Among Nepal's energy poor, people like Chaudharys are at the bottom of the pyramid. So are the communities living in the harsh terrain in the Himalayas. Members of a formerly prosperous community, tens of thousands of Tharus were driven out of their farmlands by hill immigrants. They were also forced into a bonded labor system, which was abolished only in 2000 following decades of servitude.
But as dusk fell, the 38-year-old family head had no time to waste over the bitter past of his community. He was working hard to save enough energy for the winter months and for the summer. The Chaudharys, like several of their neighbors, have accumulated all types of energy to meet their cooking needs. Aside from animal dung, crop waste and firewood, the locals also secure modern form of energy. An empty gas cylinder was gathering dust in a corner of their kitchen.
"Nowadays, we use residue from mustard plants for cooking; it will last for a month. The animal dung lasts for three months. Then, we also collect firewood and buy kerosene when it's available," said Chaudhary, a mustachioed man who works at a nearby paper mill drawing a monthly salary of Rs 9,000. Adding woes to his already precarious life was a drought last year, which diminished the production of mustard. The daily power outages that last for up to 14 hours in the winter has hurt the study of his 14-year-old daughter Pratima, an eighth grader. "It would be great if we had regular power supply, but it goes off when I need it most in the evening," she said.
A look inside Chaudhary's three-year-old dwelling suggested a house in a state of disorder. A single bulb lighted a room with a rickety fan and an old TV set. Another room had walls without cement coating. Scattered on the floor were potatoes, sacks of rice, cooking utensils and clothes. He has already spent half a million rupees on the building, but it is far from complete.
The most important source of energy for the Chaudhary household sat idly under tiled roofs outside their home. The water buffalo and her two calves can supply enough raw materials for a biogas plant that would cost about Rs 40,000. The dome-shaped plants are ideal for the plains with its hot climate and plenty of groundwater.
But the problem, again, is money. "A biogas plant would have solved my problem. But I can't afford it. I know the government provides us subsidy, but even then I don't have enough money to install it here. If I had one, I could have used the animal dung as fertilizer even after producing gas," he said.
That Chaudhary has not benefited from the state's subsidy regime shows its limitations. "Government has blanket and one-size-fits-all strategy, but certain community has certain kind of energy needs. And, we are yet to reach out to the most disadvantaged," Bibek Raj Kandel, national advisor of the Alternative Energy Promotion Center, said. His colleague Prakash Aryal, a wind manager, offered another perspective. "Our model for subsidy allows private sector to cater to the beneficiaries. But a private company by nature would serve to local elites, which could be the reason those people have been left behind," he said. "Our model has several constraints. Banks are yet to expand to rural areas where the subsidy should be provided."
Travelling through a section of Nepal's East-West Highway, it was apparent that the energy crisis had also hit the relatively well-off people.
Nirmala Shrestha, 30, was among a group of five women walking on the edge of asphalt in Daunne of Nawalparasi district one afternoon in early February, their back bending with the load of twigs and tree branches. It had been a long day for the mother of two young girls, who began the trip in mid-morning.
As her neighborhood's cooking gas dealer started to ration fuel by distributing only half full cylinder, Shrestha and others decided to take matters into their own hands. "If you buy this much firewood, it costs you 800 rupees. So we decided to collect it ourselves," Shrestha said as her fellow foragers joined in the conversation. The tropical forest with sal and other broadleaf trees is run by one of Nepal's internationally recognized community forest groups, who allowed people like Shrestha to collect fuelwood twice a week. Shrestha wasn't exactly running out of energy, but was rather hoarding multiple energy sources, a trend that emerged following an economic embargo imposed by India, the sole supplier of fuel including petrol, diesel and cooking gas. "This will be enough for me to cook food for two weeks. We can't buy cooking gas even if we have money. This makes me very sad," she said.
Shrestha's husband was serving in the Indian Army as a soldier, a mercenary in a two-century-old recruitment system established by British after they lost war with Nepal in 1816. The irony of her husband serving in the armed force of the country that cut the lifeline of a small neighbor wasn't lost on Shrestha, but she was guarded about it, saying: "This is the reality we have been facing in Nepal; I think India is behind it (the blockade)."
Blockade or no blockade, the government has been under pressure to seek solutions to the energy crisis facing the country. On February 18th, the government announced an 'energy emergency' for two years, pledging to end the rolling blackouts within two years. With a legacy of past announcements to produce thousands of megawatts of electricity yet to translate into reality, the latest move has a lot of skeptics.
For millions of people in the rural regions, collecting fuelwood or other materials for cooking continues to be a daunting task. And, energy experts such as Anirudh Sah say Nepal has a long way to go. "Nepal's energy use is problematic. In developed countries, large amount of energy is used for industry, but in Nepal households are the largest consumers of energy. We need to change this and optimize our energy production," he said.
Sah sees hope in the hybrid model. "For renewable energy to gain growth, hybrid model—between wind and solar—is the best way because both of these provide intermittent energy and can complement each other," he said.
This content was produced with the support of the Access to Energy Journalism Fellowship and Discourse Media (www.discoursemedia.org)
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