DPA/Dhaka

Bangladesh’s national grid carried an additional 175 megawatts of electricity on the first day after Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina inaugurated the project at Bheramara, a town near the border with India about 120km 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 co-ordinating the more than $197mn 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 160mn people, most of whom do not have
electrical service.

Those who do regularly experience power outages of up to five hours a day in Bangladesh’s largest cities, said the Asian Development Bank, which has warned along with the World Bank that Bangladesh’s dearth of power negatively impacts its economy and services, including health care and education.

Hasina also unveiled the plaque of a foundation stone for the 1,320-megawatt Friendship Super Thermal Power Project, an India-financed, coal-fired power plant near a World Heritage Site, the Sundarban mangrove forest. Environmental
activists oppose the project.

Bangladesh is one of the poorest countries in the world with more than a quarter of its population living under the poverty line of earning $2 per day or less.

Speaking through video conference from the Indian capital New Delhi, India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said with the inauguration of the grid connection both sides would “embark on a new partnership for prosperity between our two countries”.

India’s National Thermal Power Co (NTPC) has started exporting 250MW of electricity to Bangladesh from Saturday at a fixed tariff.

Manmohan Singh said with the inauguration of the grid line a “shared aspiration of our people has been translated into a concrete outcome”.

He said the initiatives “being undertaken today strengthen the bonds of friendship between India and Bangladesh and add a rich new dimension to our bilateral relations. Economic development is the biggest challenge for all countries in South Asia. Our destinies are inter-linked and so must our economies be,” the Indian prime minister said.

Manmohan Singh said the “key to shared prosperity is greater trade and investment in our region and improved connectivity through transport, road, rail, telecom, cyber and energy links. Today’s inauguration represents an important milestone in connecting our two countries and the broader region through a growing web of cross-border energy links and trade.”

He said while both sides have made rapid progress in many areas of cooperation “we do recognise that we have to make progress in other areas. We are committed to completing the tasks we had agreed upon in a manner that responds to the mutual aspirations of both our peoples,” he said.

Manmohan Sinh said that India and Bangladesh have shown that “we can pursue cooperative endeavours to harness the boundless economic potential of our relationship based on the principles of equality, sovereignty and mutual prosperity”.

“I look forward with confidence to a future of deeper cooperation in energy and all other dimensions of our relationship,” he said.