Bangladesh has been living in darkness since Tuesday afternoon local time. At least 130 million people were without power following a grid failure that led to a blackout, the government’s electricity company said.
The grid went down at 2 p.m. local time, and except for parts of northwest Bangladesh, “the rest of the country is without power,” Shamim Ahsan, a gatekeeper, told AFP. -word of the Energy Development Council. The latter specified that more than two out of three inhabitants were deprived of electricity.
According to the spokesperson, the origin of this network failure is not yet known. “The investigation is still ongoing,” he said, adding that a technical failure could be the cause. According to a message from Zunaid Palak, Minister of Technology, posted on Facebook, electricity supply will be restored at 8 p.m. local time in Dhaka, the capital, which has a population of 22 million.
austerity measures
Bangladesh has been suffering for several months from a serious energy crisis due to the rise in world prices of fuel and gas, following the invasion of Ukraine by Russia. Struggling to finance the import of diesel and gas in sufficient quantity to meet the demand for electricity, Dhaka had to introduce “austerity measures”. The country’s diesel power plants producing electricity, with a generating capacity of 1,500 megawatts, and some gas-fired power plants have been shut down.
The anger of the population has intensified following these numerous and long power cuts. A hundred people were injured during a demonstration violently repressed by the police, according to the opposition party Bangladesh Nationalist Party. Tens of thousands of mosques across the country have been ordered to only run air conditioners during the five daily prayers. Before this blackout, Bangladesh had experienced a major blackout in November 2014. Nearly 70% of the country was then without electricity for nearly ten hours.