Contribution of Micro Hydro in Promoting Rural Livelihood (A Case Study of Bhalayedanda Village, Udayapur, Nepal)

Abstract

Livelihood covers the activities necessary to protect a person's ability, wealth, income, and living needs, so it is a means of survive. A sustainable livelihood enhance people's well-being and preserve the natural environment or resource base for future generations, and it helps people recover from conflicts and stresses, such as natural disasters, and economic or social upheavals. Micro hydro projects play a major role in sustainable rural livelihood. The facility of electricity has not been fulfilled yet in most of the remote villages of mountain and hill region, which leads to the negative impact in health, education, business, technology and whole economic status of the rural people. Generally when we focus on people in some remote sectors who don’t use heater, light, fan, radio, television, computer because they have no electricity facilities. There are no good hospitals, health canters having no x-ray and other lab facilities which bring difficulties to find out the diseases and where immediate treatment is required is not all possible because there is no electricity. They cut the trees and use woods for their daily cooking which not only invites the environmental degradation but also pollute the air and brings health problem and harms biodiversity. Nepal is rich in water resources which prove to have huge potential in hydropower. Hydro power is an easy available and reliable source of energy needed for human beings. However, there are a lot of possibilities of making the country rich by producing electricity from our innumerable rivers flowing across the country. Nepal has low rate of per capital energy consumption. Energy consumption is considered to be one of the key factors of measuring the development of the country. The remote hilly and mountainous areas of Nepal are suitable for installing Micro Hydro Power Plants. The research work was carried out focusing on the contribution of micro-hydro in promoting rural livelihood. The specific objectives are; to determine the socio-economic impact of micro-hydro in rural communities and to analyze the role of micro-hydro in environmental conservation. The research was carried out on the basis of social research methodology. Primary data are collected with the help of users' questionnaire, field survey, key informant interview, and observation, focusing on group discussion whereas the secondary data were collected from different documents or literature from individuals, experts and organization which is related to micro hydropower etc. For details of data analysis the help of computer program was taken and simple statistical tools were used. The research indicates increasing of self-employment, improvement of health condition of the people, work load reduction, forest conservation, community development, economical progress and fulfilling the expectation of the rural people after installing the micro hydropower.