“Under the Electricity Act of Bhutan, section 11, the Druk Green Power Corporation and Bhutan Power Corporation are mandated to offer recommendations for tariff changes every 3 years” - MoENR Minister Lyonpo Gem Tshering.
However, a statutory requirement to review tariffs does not equate to a mandate to increase them. The Electricity Regulatory Authority’s role is to ensure tariffs reflect actual contexts, and at this critical juncture, hiking domestic electricity prices contradicts both our national economic security and environmental justice.
Currently, Bhutan is trapped in a severe economic paradox: we export our clean hydropower for revenue, only to hemorrhage our limited currency reserves, spending billions annually on importing polluting fossil fuels. In span of recent threee months Bhutan is reported to have spent approximately Nu. 1.45 billion on fuel price support and subsidies under its National Fuel Price Smoothening Framework to combat fuel rpice hike due to war in Western Asia. With global energy markets becoming increasingly volatile, the government’s priority should be aggressively incentivizing households to transition to our own domestically generated electricity for cooking, heating, and transportation. While many developed nations integrate electric ovens and efficient heating into standard building codes, Bhutan continues to rely heavily on imported Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG), leaving the promotion of essential electric appliances entirely to private firms. Electricity is quantifiably cheaper and far more efficient than LPG. Increasing the domestic tariff narrows this advantage, actively punishing citizens who are trying to make the transition the state claims to support.
It is also logically flawed to compare the price of our locally produced hydropower to energy costs in countries that must import their power. A more accurate comparison would be resource-rich nations, such as the Gulf states. Those governments export their primary resource globally for profit, while heavily subsidizing domestic energy costs to share the national wealth with their citizens. Bhutan should treat its hydropower the same way.
Furthermore, the true cost of our hydropower goes well beyond financial capital, it includes profound ecological externalities. By damming our rivers to build mega-projects, we have sacrificed free-flowing aquatic ecosystems and permanently altered our landscapes. The citizens of Bhutan bear these localized environmental burdens. Providing subsidized, baseline electricity is therefore not a state handout; it is a mechanism of equitable benefit sharing. It functions as a direct resource dividend, returning to the people as compensation for the environmental costs they have already absorbed.
Imposing an electricity tariff hike now is pouring salt on an open wound. Citizens are already grappling with the economic burdens of the self-imposed GST, exogenous fossil fuel inflation. We are also continuously reminded of the government's highly anticipated election pledge to reduce mobile data charges by 50 percent, a promise that remains stalled and unfulfilled in 2026 due to sudden concerns over corporate revenues. The logic here is simple: if the government continues to fail to bring down costs it explicitly promised to reduce, and cannot control costs dictated by global commodity markets, it absolutely must not increase the essential living costs that are entirely within its administrative and legislative control.
