By Dr Upendra Gautam
The long-term bilateral power export agreement between India and Nepal sounds like a commercial deal. This agreement is a G-to-G (Government-to-Government) umbrella deal and is valid infinitely. Nepal signing such an umbrella deal with India has displaced itself by abdicating its’ rightful position on the most strategic and scarce water resources (MSSWR) of Nepal.
From now on, India will concentrate on Nepal’s MSSWR, as this resource will be under India’s preponderance. Nepal will be buying electricity produced by Nepali water from India. India will sell water energy produced in Nepal to any Trans-Himalayan market.
India has been very able to influence the ruling Nepali leaders to artificially divorce naturally indivisible energy from water. On the surface, Nepal sells hydropower, but in essence, it is totally and infinitely selling Nepal’s water and the Himalayan-fed Mother Rivers.
Ancient Nepal looks to be a history-less country. The past water resources agreements with India inform that from now on, Nepal’s benefit from a water project in Nepal will be exclusively fixed by India at about 21 percent of the energy produced from a water project. Such fixation follows the colonialist design of benefit sharing that British colonialists have imposed on Nepal since 1924.
This agreement, in the cover of a commercial agreement, has been designed to avoid the ratification of Nepal’s constitutionally sovereign parliament. Nepal’s basic law makes it mandatory that any agreement implying the perennial allocation and use of natural resources to produce goods like electricity be duly ratified by a parliamentary vote. The agreement has tactically avoided the due process stipulated in the Constitution of Nepal.
The political-business complex successfully led by Prime Minister Modi of India is concentrating on using the Nepal Investment Summit April 28-29, 2024 to legitimize India’s monopoly over Nepal’s MSSWR.
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