Your excellent coverage of Nepal's power sector 10 years after the inevitable collapse of the badly planned Arun III ('Ten years after abandoning Arun III', #223) should take the debate to new levels of enlightenment. Unfortunately the comments by former and present vice chairmen of the National Planning Commission do not leave much room for hope: our senior economic planners still refuse to learn the right lessons. It is amazing that Dr Ram Sharan Mahat should say $400 million in committed grants and loans had to be written off. The truth is that ADB and Japan used their money committed to Arun III in Kali Gandaki and the smaller bilaterals spent their grants in constructing new transmission lines for Nepal. It is only the World Bank that has shown singular incompetence in utilising its portion of the committed aid to get a Power Development Fund off the ground in all these 10 years. Dr Shankar Sharma couches his comment with an "if" ("if the rate of return calculations made sense"). That is like saying "we can all eat a big omelette if elephants laid eggs".

Shiva Bisangkhe,
Lalitpur