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KATHMANDU, Mar 10 (Xinhua): Load-shedding hours will soon be further extended by one to two hours per day per household in Nepal as the country now face severe power shortage, officials at Nepal Electricity Authority (NEA) said here today.
Currently, load-shedding stood at 35 hours per week per household in the country.
"The current rate of load-shedding is not helping much," said NEA Spokesperson Birendra Kumar Pathak, adding, "The Kulekhani projects continue to be under stress as load has switched to the hours when we supply power."
The Kulekhani projects are the only reliable source of power in the country in dry season. Ideally, the projects are closed during wet season so that the reservoir is replenished for use in the dry season.
This year, the projects had to generate power even in the wet season owing to the breakdown in a turbine at Kaligandaki "A" project, one of run-of-river projects. That left the reservoir 12 meters below ideal level even in the wet season.
NEA hoped to keep the Kulekhani projects functioning till the next wet season by slowing down the decrease in water level in their reservoir from 70 centimeters a day to 25 centimeters a day.
However, water level in the reservoir continues to go down by 40 centimeters a day now, an official of the NEA said.
US Senate panel approves modified version of Bush's budget proposal
WASHINGTON, Mar 10 (AP): A Senate panel approved a scaled-back version of President George W.Bush's budget, shorn of signature initiatives such as tax relief and cuts to federal benefit programmes such as health care for the elderly.
With Republicans nervous about cutting popular programmes in an election year and still nursing wounds from a bruising round of benefit cuts last year, the Budget Committee gave party-line 11-10 approval Thursday to a budget that takes few risks but also makes little progress in addressing the long-term fiscal problems facing the government.
Driven by political concerns, Budget Committee Chairman Judd Gregg, a Republican, dropped Bush's proposals for expanding tax-free medical accounts and restraining spending for the Medicare health care programme for senior citizens. He also seeks to shift about $5 billion (euro4.2 billion) from the Pentagon and foreign aid budgets to cash-strapped domestic programmes like education and homeland security.
The measure heads to the Senate floor Monday, but with congressional election-year anxiety running high, there's no guarantee the full Senate will actually pass the Republican budget blueprint.
"I'm not going in with the votes, I can tell you that much," Gregg told The Associated Press. "There's a high level of angst and indecision out there."
For starters, five Republicans opposed to oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge have warned Gregg they'll probably oppose his plan on the floor for including a provision to permit ANWR drilling to advance via the filibuster-proof budget process.
There are 55 Republicans in the Senate, which means no additional defections could occur if the bill is to squeak through with Vice President Dick Cheney casting a tie-breaking vote.
Gregg's plan would produce a $359 billion (euro301 billion) deficit next year. Deficits would drop to $177 billion by 2011.
Democrats castigated Gregg's plan, saying it would produce those lower deficits only by leaving out the long-term costs of the war in Iraq and the price of establishing Bush's Social Security personal accounts and failing to address the ever-increasing impact that the alternative minimum tax is having on middle-class taxpayers.
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