Mohammadi News Agency News – Features – Photo
MNA International Desk: The squalid camps in Bangladesh that are now home to nearly 600,000 newly arrived Rohingya have no running water and barely any toilets, but they do have power—thanks to a proliferation of solar panels.
That means refugees can charge their phones and power electric lights and fans, a lifeline in tents that become baking hot in the strong sun.
Some of the refugees say the solar panels were among the few precious possessions they grabbed as they fled villages in Myanmar that have been burned to the ground in a campaign of retribution following militant attacks on police posts.
Others have used their meagre resources to buy them after arriving in Bangladesh, where they have had to set up home in the overcrowded refugee camps near the border.
In the absence of mains electricity, the sun is a precious source of energy for the Rohingya now living in camps, where even food and clean water are hard to come by.
But many villages in the isolated and under-developed northern part of Myanmar’s Rakhine state where the refugees have travelled from also lacked access to mains power.
The refugees spoke to accused mainly Buddhist Myanmar of being unwilling to invest in areas inhabited by the Rohingya, a Muslim minority that the government regards as illegal immigrants, reported news agency.
In fact it is not just the Rohingya — 50 percent of the population of Myanmar lacks access to mains electricity.
