Nepalis endured a crippling power shortage for a decade from 2006-2016, and were told over and over again that it was because of the gap between demand and supply. The Nepal Electricity Authority (NEA) blamed the war for delayed projects, political instability -– everything but corruption.

However, in 2016 Nepalis got a pleasant surprise. As soon as the NEA had a new chief, Kul Man Ghising, they started getting 24 hours of power supply. It was a miracle. Or was it?

Ghising said modestly then that it was just a matter of “better management of demand and supply”. But our investigation has revealed that Nepalis did not suffer from load-shedding just because of undersupply but because of structural corruption — top NEA executives were selling electricity to industrialists, leaving household consumers in the darkness for 10 years.