Frequent power cuts in intense heat have left cold-storage owners and potato growers in Nilphamari district fearing for their stock. Operators run generators when the grid fails, but say they cannot hold the set temperature. Roughly 77,000 tonnes of potatoes stored in the district's 11 cold stores are at risk, including about 40,000 tonnes of seed potato — a loss that would hit planting in the next season.

According to the power division, Nilphamari needs about 153 megawatts a day but is receiving only 50 to 60 per cent of that, and load shedding has risen with the gap. Md Alimul Islam Selim, resident engineer of the Northern Electricity Supply Company (NESCO) at Saidpur, said supply is short of demand, so factories and cold stores cannot be given what they need; efforts are under way to balance the two.

Cooling plant has to run for a set stretch of time, operators explain; when the power drops midway the whole cycle restarts from the beginning. Nahid Hasan Jony, manager of Shaon cold store, said that means extra electricity and labour, and that running generators for long hours is hard to afford. Dipu Roy, manager of Uttara cold store, put it in figures: if a chamber takes an hour to cool, an outage after 30 minutes means starting over, and the cost climbs.

Soleman Ali, a farmer from Botlagari in Saidpur, has seed potatoes in store for next season's planting. If the seed spoils, he said, a good yield next year will be hard to get, and he wants uninterrupted power for the cold stores. A trader at one of the stores said power is off for much of the day and generators cannot run every machine at once; if the potatoes spoil, farmers will bear the biggest loss.

At Saidpur's Ismail seed cold store, Sajeda and Northern cold storage, farmers and wholesalers from the area and beyond have stored both seed and table potatoes, all now exposed to the same risk. Because northern Bangladesh's potato belt depends on cold-stored seed, a spoilage event in Nilphamari would ripple into the seed supply for the coming Rabi season.

Based on reporting by Ittefaq's Saidpur (Nilphamari) correspondent Md Amiruzzaman. Source: Ittefaq