Nepal and the China-EU Lending Race

One morning in the summer of 2016, Chandra Mishra, a farmer from Udipur town in Nepal’s Lamjung district, discovered that a tree on his property had gone missing. It was a large Albizia tree, which Mishra had hoped to one day harvest for wood for making furniture. But during the night, someone had cut the tree and it fell down a steep bank into the Marsyangdi River, which courses below Mishra’s rice fields. Mishra soon learned that workers for a new electricity project – the 132 kilo-volt (kV) Bhulbhule power line, which transports electricity from a Chinese-built 50 megawatt hydro-electric power plant upriver to Nepal’s national grid – had cut his tree to make way for their development.

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