Dhaka's rolling electricity blackouts, which hit every other hour, also mean Mamota, a 26-year-old mother of two, has no light to help her children with homework or power to watch television, so they often just sit in their living room, sweating in the dark.

"Everyone in my family is getting skin diseases from the foul-smelling tap water. My children won't drink the water, and I cannot cook decent meals because of gas shortages," Mamota, whose husband is a civil servant, told AFP.

This South Asian nation of 144 million people is experiencing what one newspaper called "the world's worst peacetime utilities crisis," with power, gas and water shortages driving even middle-class residents such as Mamota to despair.

"Our life is hell," she said, a sentiment shared by many of Dhaka's 13 million residents, thousands of whom have protested against the chronic utilities shortages in the streets, prompting the government to scramble to respond.

Dhaka has a daily shortfall of 2,000 megawatts of power, which is half of the entire country's average daily production.

The capital needs 2.2 billion litres of water a day, but the city's water authorities can supply just 1.9 billion litres, according to official figures, with many public pumps operating below capacity because of the gas shortage.

With the city's 550 public pumps struggling to meet demand, the army was deployed last week to protect "key installations" including water treatment plants, said Taqsen Khan, chief of Dhaka's water supply authority.

Bangladesh's gas supplies, crucial for cooking, running cars and generating electricity, are also massively overburdened -- with demand of 2,400 million cubic feet of gas per day and supply of 1,900 million cubic feet.

"To supply enough gas to the power plants and industries we have to search for more gas reserves," said Dhaka University geology Professor Humayun Akhtar, adding that current reserves of 7.7 trillion cubic feet will run out by 2020.

Last week, the government tried to defuse widespread unrest and protests by diverting gas from industrial use to power plants, which led to a record of 4,600 megawatts of power against demand of 5,300 megawatts.

"The current, deepening crisis is the result of years of unplanned growth of the city's population, under-investment in infrastructure and a total lack of initiative by the authorities," said planning expert A.K.M Abul Kalam.

Kalam, who is head of Jahangirnagar University's urban and regional planning department, said rapid, unplanned urbanisation coupled with impressive but unregulated economic growth had created the current crisis.

The prime minister, who has been in office a year and blames her predecessors for the utilities crisis, has called on the public to be "patient" and issued a directive banning government officials from using air-conditioners.

Last year, bureaucrats were instructed not to wear suits to the office during the summer months to save energy.

One senior official at a government-run bank, speaking on condition of anonymity, told AFP that bank employees routinely flouted the government's air-conditioner ban and simply stopped working during the regular blackouts.

The temperature in Dhaka this week has been around 37 degrees Celsius (99 degrees Fahrenheit).

"It is impossible to work when the power goes out -- it's boiling hot, the lights go out and we can't see anything," he said, adding that he and his colleagues usually just left their office when the blackouts hit.

"It's ridiculous," he said.

In a bid to find a quick fix to the power crisis, the government this week "fast-tracked" the approval process for foreign firms to set up new power plants.

"We have already started talks with reputed power companies... bypassing the time-consuming tendering process," PDB chairman Alamgir Kabir told AFP.

Companies such as US-based General Electric and APR specialise in setting up power plants in months, he said. APR claims it can set up a fast-track power plant in 15-30 days once it brings equipment on site, Kabir said.

Under the scheme, the companies will set up a series of 60-70 megawatt capacity small power plants -- mainly fired by diesel-- on land provided by the government or on barges close to key harbours, he said.

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