Playing electrical Russian roulette
Thieves in the former Burma's main city, Yangon, are taking advantage of outages often lasting for more than 20 hours a day to steal the copper power cables, police said.
Sometimes, of course, they get unlucky.
"The thieves are risking their lives as it is impossible to know exactly when the power is going to be restored. It's just like playing Russian roulette," said one Yangon police officer who did not want to be named.
"I've seen a few cases in which thieves were electrocuted. In April, a 16-year-old boy was found dead, holding a broken cable from a lamppost. Only God knows for sure whether he was a thief or not."
Innocent passers-by are also falling victim.
"In one case, the broken cable end left by the thief dangled into a puddle and a woman jogger was killed when she stepped into it," he said.
Four decades of military rule and economic mismanagement have turned Myanmar - the world's number one rice exporter when it won independence from Britain in 1948 - into one of Asia's biggest basket cases.
Despite huge off-shore natural gas reserves, the southeast Asian nation's 53 million people have access to less than 10 percent of the electricity per capita of neighboring Thailand.
Related News
China aims to reduce coal power production
BEIJING - China plans to slash coal-fired power capacity at its five biggest utilities by as much as a third in two years by merging their assets, according to a document seen by Reuters and four sources with knowledge of the matter.
The move to shed older and less-efficient capacity is being driven by pressure to cut heavy debt levels at the utilities. China, is, however, building more coal-fired power plants and approving dozens of new mines to bolster a slowing economy.
The five utilities, which are controlled by the central government, accounted for around 44% of China’s total coal-fired power capacity…
