Residents of Barishal city are enduring a severe power crisis, facing daily outages that leave them without electricity for up to eleven hours a day. Frequent disruptions have severely dislocated routine life, hitting children, the elderly, and students the hardest.
The intense load shedding began at the start of July, sweeping across various neighbourhoods. Power cuts regularly stretch between one to one-and-a-half hours per instance, occurring eight to ten times across day and night. With electricity unavailable for a substantial portion of the day, daily activities have ground to a near standstill. Judicial proceedings in local courts, academic preparations for students, and commercial trade have all taken a heavy toll.
Disrupted sleep has become a nightly reality for citizens due to prolonged outages during the early hours. Local journalists report that the erratic power supply is also severely hampering newspaper printing operations, delaying press runs and news distribution.
Official figures from the power sector underline the widening gap between supply and demand. According to Md Monjurul Islam, executive engineer at the West Zone Power Distribution Company (WZPDCL) in Barishal, the city houses approximately 150,000 consumers with a peak demand of 100 megawatts. However, the local grid receives only half of that required allocation, forcing authorities to implement rolling blackouts.
Frustrated by the persistent disruptions, local communities are demanding immediate intervention to halt the excessive load shedding and restore a reliable, uninterrupted electricity supply to the metropolitan area.
How do you think municipalities can better manage severe infrastructure strains during peak summer demand?
