ChakkaJam All over Town!

Expats

Written by Peter Francon

Saturday, 24 January 2009 01:07

Friday 16th January 2009 saw most of Kathmandu brought to a halt as the Safa Tempo Drivers union staged a ‘Chakkajam’ at one or two important road junctions in the centre of Kathmandu.

A SAFA Tempo plies its route in Kathmandu A Safa Tempo - Safa in Nepali means clean and Tempo is the generic term for small vehicles used to carry people on short routes, stopping when hailed or not full to overflowing with people. It’s a small three wheeler carrying 10 people running on battery power.

A chakkajam is the traffic jam created by the road block when they park 649 of these silent white knights, across junctions on main urban thoroughfares. One at least I saw had been completely smashed, it lay forlornly wrecked in the middle of the road near one such jam I encountered, whilst trying to return from the Transport Department Office (more of which later).

Within the space of about 15 minutes the entire road network in central Kathmandu can be brought to a halt, drivers make U turns and drive back to the what’s now become another jam. In the end 500,000 motorcycles, cars, jeeps, buses, trucks, rickshaws and pedestrians get snarled in a mess that takes hours to clear, wastes thousands of litres of fuel and occupies the best part of everyone’s day. Chakkajams are utterly destructive and are still allowed to take place despite government claims of restored law and order.

The Safa Tempo was introduced into Nepal about ten years ago as an experiment to demonstrate an electric powered transportation programme - the fleet now numbers around 750 and recent surveys suggest that as many as 4000 could be in service in the next few years.

However Nepal faces a deepening crisis, the nation consumes far more electricity than it can produce or afford to buy from India. Given that a large proportion of Nepal’s power needs come from hydro-power generating projects, often high in the mountains, at the end of precarious roads and given the fact that the dams that contain their reservoirs are rapidly emptying, the water flow must be rationed. Close the tap a little, the turbine can't spin with such strength and the power we get has to be rationed. The process of reducing the load on the national grid is called load-shedding and only today this deprivation was reduced by a meagre 2 hours daily from 16 hours to 14 hours of enforced darkness.

The Prime Minister was forced to bow to the pressure of such protests as the Tempo Drivers, the Grill Workers Union (they grill meat in fast food restaurants) and surprisingly one or two local communities whose lives may have been affected by the channelling of water away from their section of river - through the turbines, and dumped back into the river downstream. They argue that they lose out twice, first they lose their river water then they lose the electricity produced by the water that was ‘stolen’ from them. ‘Why should we suffer twice’, they protest.

They can’t of course produce traffic jams in the mountains, but they do lock the offices of the power House workers, in staged events called 'Geraoing' or 'surrounding', effectively closing the power plant for some hours until someone hears their gripe and placates them by promising the earth, which in turn is rearely delivered. After all, out of sight out of mind, and you can't get much further from sight in the mountains, being at least a day's hard journey from the capital if not longer.

And so the PM was forced to reduce the hours of load-shedding. “Prime Minister Dahal will reduce load-shedding hours by half within the week!” Or so the newspapers claimed. As if by magic Nepal’s Prime Minister and Party Chairman of the Communist Party of Nepal - Maoist, Pushpa Kamal Dahal has reduced Nepal’s burden of darkness.

Let the turbines spin! I can fill empty reservoirs! Use what you want!

What he didn't tell us, was that the day of reckoning, will only come sooner for a nation already begging on bleeding knees.

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