Knock on reconciliation

The Joint Steering Committee also discussed implementing a hydropower project in Bhutan through a tripartite investment between Bangladesh, Bhutan, and India. Nepal has an estimated hydropower potential of around 80,000MW, but the country can only produce around 2,000MW. Since 2019, Nepal has been exporting power to India at six Indian rupees per unit. Bangladesh imports 1,160MW of power from India through the Baharampur-Bheramara and TripuraCumilla cross-border grid lines. Bangladesh aims to increase the share of imported electricity in its energy mix up to 40 percent by 2041 when the total generation capacity will reach 60,000MW.

The northeastern region is India's main hub for increasing its renewable energy capacity. India needs to tap the unexplored natural resources of its Northeast. This region has a potential of 33,100 MW of hydropower. Still, it is untapped because of the low electricity demand, while the absence of a power grid hinders the supply of excess electricity to its western parts. Electricity transmission from northeastern India to western parts of India requires a corridor through Bangladesh due to geo-political boundaries.

Because India can achieve its untapped opportunities of hydropower from the northeastern region by establishing power transmission lines over Bangladesh, both Bangladesh and India should come forward to enhance their energy security based on reciprocity and enhance South Asian regional cooperation

India and Bangladesh want to substantially increase their share of renewable energy in the upcoming years. The Indian government has set an ambitious plan to generate 500GW from non-fossil energy-based sources by 2030, meeting 50 percent of energy requirements from renewables. Likewise, Bangladesh wants to increase the share of renewable energy in the country's power mix to around 40 percent by 2050 from less than three percent now.

Bangladesh has the potential to offer multiple electricity corridors for transmission. Arunachal Pradesh alone has a 50,000 MW hydroelectricity potential. According to Indian North Eastern Electric Power Corporation, the Indian North Eastern Region has the potential of about 58,971 MW of power, almost 40 percent of India's total hydropower potential.

This is why India wants to build power transmission lines for using the power corridor of Bangladesh to reduce the cost. In 2021, Bangladesh showed interest in the power corridor and expected to get 20 to 25 percent of the hydropower to be transmitted through the high-voltage gridline passing through its territory. The transmission line with the capacity of 6,000MW in Bangladeshi land may be 100km in length if it is built in Boropukuria and 200km if it is installed in Jamalpur, while a substation would be built in each route. Two possible routes of the transmission line are — from Asam's Bonga through Baropukuria (Dinajpur) or Jamalpur to Bihar's Punia and from Asam's Silchar via Meghna Ghat-Bheramara to West Bengal. There can be such high-capacity interconnectors in Tripura-Comilla, Bongaigaon (Assam)-Jamalpur/Dinajpur-Purnea (Bihar), Silchar (Assam), and Fenchuganj.

This deal will be fruitful only if India finally allows a power corridor to Bangladesh to import electricity from Nepal. Three grid-connected countries –Nepal, Bangladesh, and Bhutan can participate in the most competitive Day-Ahead Power Market on the power exchanges to either meet their power supply requirements or to replace costlier power in their portfolio. This South Asian Power Market can further expand and develop as more countries in the region are becoming connected. Along with getting the corridor, Bangladesh needs to ensure that it gets a fair share of electricity from India in return for establishing those transmission lines Because India can achieve its untapped opportunities of hydropower from the northeastern region by establishing power transmission lines over Bangladesh, both Bangladesh and India should come forward to enhance their energy security based on reciprocity and enhance South Asian regional cooperation.

The writer is a freelance columnist

WHATEVERhappened on May 9 across the country has not gone well, no matter how much it can be condemned but the public reaction has made it clear to everyone what is in the hearts of the people and what the people think. When the ruling coalition will make such decisions in an obscure sense, as seen during the past year, the fire of revenge flares up and all the politics will be closed in a hateful sentence that ‘now they will stay or we will stay’, then the same circumstances will persist. The people have been protesting for a long time and have been demanding what they want, now the elite or stakeholders have to decide whether they go in support of the general public or take a decision against the people.

This is not an old era, but a new era and now people are very politically conscious. In this era, like in the past, the people cannot be fooled by the art of governance and puppet shows, nor can closed-room decisions be imposed. Now the decisions will be made in the public square and the decisions of the general public will be accepted, so it is better to give a chance to the public consciousness and the prevailing method of checking it is free and transparent elections. But, the ruling coalition will never give the people a chance to vote because they know that the decision of the people will come against them. Everything is being put at stake due to the fear of this defeat. On the one hand, violations of the constitution and law are being done and on the other hand, it is being brought before the public by creating conflicts in the institutions. This dispute has nothing to do with the public and the national interest. It is a clash of some personalities which has been turned into an institutional clash. In this turmoil, efforts are being made to suppress, humiliate and pressurize each other but in this whole fight, the country is losing. Does the ruling coalition have any perception of how the country’s borders will be protected during this fight? How will the back of the terrorists be broken, how will the country overcome the crises? Since, everyone is trying to destroy each other and interpreting this behaviour, Interior Minister Rana Sanaullah says that Imran Khan has formulated gangs in every city, now no one will be spared and this means that they are now engaged in action against PTI workers across the country, but

No matter how bad the situation is at the moment, those who use the efforts of improvement should not be disappointed and should keep knocking on the closed doors of reconciliation, If the door of reconciliation is not opened even at the knock, then no one will come to save democracy and dictatorship will not take long to displace the democracy quietly, albeit its signs have started to be seen very clearly there will be a backlash and once again the same old politics will be repeated by defaming each other. The people are drowning in the mire of rising inflation and unemployment and the rulers are trying to save their power. As one dispute after another is being raised in the country, the attention of the nation is being diverted from the real issues and being diverted towards personal disputes. The Pakistani nation has seen such a spectacle many times, the nation is being fooled in the name of getting rid of inflation- sometimes in the name of honouring the vote or sometimes in the name of bread, cloth, and house and sometimes in the name of Kashmir. Whilst all who advances to power start a campaign against the opposition and the opposition against government, in this country no one has ever thought about the people, here everyone takes turns and all the problems of the nation are put on the backburner. Even now, the direction the situation is taking, it seems that the game of turns is going to start once again. People are fed up with tried and failed scripts, this game of likes and dislikes and turns should stop now. The situation that has arisen after Imran Khan's arrest has left no peace. Where there was a happy festival in India, there was a lot of laughter all over the world but how strange it is that instead of learning from this, the ruling coalition is protesting against the Supreme Court. The ruling coalition should understand the gravity of the situation in the larger interest of the country and instead of doing anything to facilitate chaos, a way should be found to end the confrontation as if a fire is ignited, it can be extinguished in a few moments but it takes a lot of effort to put it out. Despite the government’s unconstitutional stance, the Supreme Court has repeatedly given an option to both the government and the opposition to find a way of reconciliation. No matter how bad the situation is at the moment, those who use the efforts of improvement should not be disappointed and should keep knocking on the closed doors of reconciliation, If the door of reconciliation is not opened even at the knock, then no one will come to save democracy and dictatorship will not take long to displace the democracy quietly, albeit its signs have started to be seen very clearly.

The writer tweets @AttiyaMunawer

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AI and Pakistan are not moving together

ARTIFICIALintelligence being the buzzword these days, everyone considers it incumbent upon them to comment on the rise of AI and the dangers, perceived or otherwise, posed by it without being cognizant of the technical details.

A case in point is the article ‘Promoting AI’ (April 17). Apparently, the article was penned with the intention of giving some background knowledge regarding the initiatives taken during the government that was led by the Nawaz faction of Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N) before 2018, including the establishment of national centres of excellence, especially in the domain of AI.

Having been part of the centre and leading a laboratory working on medical image processing and having won other funding in the same domain where AI is used to diagnose diseases through medical images, one can vouch for the lack of knowledge and under-standing of AI on the part of the writer concerned.

Despite advancements in AI and its manifestation in the form of ChatGPT, it is still in its early stages of development. Currently, very few domains are being extensively explored by AI experts due to various reasons, such as lack of human resources, lack of computational resources, which invariably are expensive, and, above all, the lack of available datasets that are the cornerstone of the development of AI pipelines. Ignored also is the fact that ChatGPT requires the use of at least 20,000 A100 GPUs with a capacity of five peta flops, where each one of them costs around $200,000. Such an exorbitant cost makes it the preserve of only a selected few.

It should also be remembered that it was developed in the United States, which has mastered both the software and hardware aspects of AI, and no other country can boast of matching its computational power as of now. Coming back to the scene in Pakistan, with its failing economy and with structural changes required, emerging technologies, such as AI, provide a beacon of hope to earn some hard cash. We have made great strides over the last few years, but relevant technical resources are not much to write home about. On top of that, we have great dearth of the required hardware resources, and finances available are miniscule both from the public as well as the private sector.

We still have to go a long way before any meaningful progress can even begin to take place, and that requires concerted efforts from all, including the government, the private sector, the academia and the entrepreneurs. However, any initiative taken by the government for the advancement of AI must have input from AI technical experts as well as people from other walks of life where the latter can probably shed more light on the ethical aspects of it. Right now what we have in the country has more of the ‘artificial’ than the ‘intelligence’ part of AI.

DR AHMAD RAZA SHAHID ISLAMABAD

Irritated, frustrated

I am a working woman and my daily commute involves a distance of 40km. The situation on the roads caused by potholes and chocked sewers is a severe nuisance millions of people have to put up with every single day.

My daily commute runs from Gulshan-e-Iqbal all the way to I.I. Chundrigar Road, which is the main business hub of the city. Overflowing sewers made worse by the digging related to a bus transport project run all through the route. The standing water in front of the building housing the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) is a major irritant because that portion of the road has always been a crowded intersection.

Over 75 years since the country’s independence, we have not been able to ensure traffic movement in the commercial and corporate hub of a city which happens to be the commercial, corporate and industrial hub of the country. That thought alone is enough to leave one irritated, frustrated and depressed. The relevant authorities should take immediate steps to improve the overall sewerage system of the city, and make Karachi a better, safer place to live in.