Bangladesh to receive electricity from Indian grid soon

Bangladesh will soon start getting electricity from the Indian grid, which will come from Nepal. Anurag Srivastava, the Joint Secretary of Northern India and former spokesperson for the Ministry of External Affairs, shared this news at an event in Bengaluru on Friday. He mentioned that there have been important updates to India’s cross-border electricity policy, allowing neighboring countries to use the Indian grid for better cooperation.

Forty megawatts of electricity will be sent from Nepal to Bangladesh through the Indian grid, and the two countries have already signed a deal for this.

Srivastava said, "This is the first transaction with Bangladesh and is in the final stages. The signed agreement will make this trade Nepal’s largest export in the next 5 to 7 years." He made these remarks at an event organized by the Bengaluru-based think tank, Synergia.

He further said, "Just three years ago, the capacity was at zero megawatts, and now that part of the Indian grid has reached a production capacity of 1,000 megawatts. With the new agreement, we are on track to scale this up to 10,000 megawatts in the coming years."

Discussing future plans, he stated that Indian investment in electricity production in neighboring countries has now doubled. There are discussions about trade infrastructure along the 1,751-kilometer Nepal border and the 699-kilometer Bhutan border. Along the Nepal border, the next set of three new Independent Connection Providers (ICPs) is currently under construction. For the India-Bhutan border, planning for the first set of ICPs is underway.