Free electricity that hurts

The effort to help the poor in Nepal with free electricity is having an adverse effect.

Through 2018, Nepal witnessed high levels of electricity shortages that resulted in rolling power outages, colloquially referred to as load-shedding. In May 2018, the Nepal Electricity Authority (NEA), the country’s monopoly power utility, valiantly declared that it had defeated load-shedding for industrial consumers. Households and residential customers had been relieved of load-shedding a year earlier. Thus, the NEA announced it had ended power outages for all .