Bangladesh begins importing electricity from India

Bangladesh on Saturday began importing electricity from neighbouring India to meet its soaring domestic demand for power, officials said. Bangladesh's national grid carried an additional 175 megawatts of electricity on the first day after Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina Wazed inaugurated the project at Bheramara, a town near the border with India about 120 kilometres west of Dhaka. The power supply from India would eventually rise to 500 megawatts under an agreement signed last year, said an official at the Power Grid Co of Bangladesh, which has been coordinating the more than 197-million-dollar project. Half the power supply would come from India's state-owned National Thermal Power Co while the rest would come from the private sector, according to the agreement. Bangladesh's public and private sectors produce nearly 6,000 megawatts of electricity for the country's 160 million people, most of whom do not have electrical service.