Yep – it happened again yesterday. Another power blackout. This time, over HALF the country was affected. It’s proven to be the world’s largest blackout.
Here’s a selection of articles from papers around the place:
Half India without power as grids fold
Date: August 1, 2012
Ben Doherty
World's largest power shortage ... a passenger looks through the window of a train as he waits for electricity to be restored at a railway station in New Delhi. Photo: Reuters
NEW DELHI: Six hundred million people in India, half the country, were plunged into darkness yesterday when a massive power outage struck across the north and east of the country.
Both the northern and eastern power grids failed, the second day in a row whole grids had collapsed under the weight of massive power demands.
But as the country struggled to cope the minister responsible won a promotion. Late yesterday the Power Minister, Sushil Kumar Shinde, was set to be announced as taking over the powerful Home Affairs portfolio.
India is a country with chronic power shortages. Demand regularly exceeds supply by 10 per cent during summer.
But this week's shortages, the worst in a decade and described as the largest in the world, have been blamed particularly on India's northern states drawing more power than they are entitled to. Uttar Pradesh, a state with a population of more than 200 million, has been accused of tripping the nation's power grid both days.
On Monday only the northern electricity grid failed. By late yesterday (Sydney time) power was still down in the north and the east, with estimates suggesting it would take up to six hours to restore. Hundreds of trains were stopped and traffic lights were out across the country.
India's continuing power crises are a growing concern for its embattled government, as it tries to restart sluggish economic growth. The Confederation of Indian Industry's director-general, Chandrajit Banerjee, said the country's development was being cruelled by its inability to keep the lights on.
''Today's grid failure was extremely unfortunate and it has impacted not just businesses but also essential services across north India,'' he said.
An estimated 300 million people live without any access to electricity at all. As these people come onto the grid, and industry continues to expand, energy consumption is tipped to grow at 7 per cent a year, far beyond the country's capability to supply.
India's structural problems have been exacerbated by an especially long, hot summer.
Similarly, Pakistan has been stricken by rolling blackouts over the past three months, which have sparked violent protests across the country.
Rioters have burned down police stations, stoned politicians' homes and burned trains over the continuing outages which have left cities without power for up to 12 hours a day, and cut villages off completely.
This article was found at: http://www.smh.com.au/world/half-india-without-power-as-grids-fold-20120731-23da7.html
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620 million without power: India's energy crisis as grids collapse
Date: August 1, 2012 - 7:59AM
India's energy crisis cascaded over half the country on Tuesday when three of its regional grids collapsed, leaving 620 million people without government-supplied electricity for several hours in, by far, the world's biggest blackout.
Hundreds of trains stalled across the country and traffic lights went out, causing widespread traffic jams in New Delhi. Electric crematoria stopped operating, some with bodies half burnt, power officials said. Emergency workers rushed generators to coal mines to rescue miners trapped underground.
The massive failure - a day after a similar, but smaller power failure - has raised serious concerns about India's outdated infrastructure and the government's inability to meet its huge appetite for energy as the country aspires to become a regional economic superpower.
Kolkata is plunged into darkness. Photo: AP
Power Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde blamed the new crisis on states taking more than their allotted share of electricity.
"Everyone overdraws from the grid. Just this morning I held a meeting with power officials from the states and I gave directions that states that overdraw should be punished. We have given instructions that their power supply could be cut," he told reporters.
The new power failure affected 620 million people across 20 of India's 28 states - about double the population of the United States. The blackout was unusual in its reach, stretching from the border with Myanmar in the northeast to the Pakistani border about 3000 kilometres away. Its impact, however, was softened by Indians' familiarity with frequent blackouts and the widespread use of backup generators for major businesses and key facilities such as hospitals and airports.
Passenger stranded inside a stalled train. Photo: AP
Shinde later said power was fully restored in the northeast grid four hours after it went down, and that the north grid had 45 per cent power and the east grid 35 per cent. R.N. Nayak, chairman of Power Grid, which runs the nation's power system, said he expected to have full power later in the evening.
Oddly, as the crisis dragged into the evening, Shinde was promoted, becoming India's home minister, its top internal security official. The promotion had been planned previously as part of a greater Cabinet shuffle before he presided over the world's two worst power outages.
The outages came just a day after India's northern power grid collapsed for several hours. Indian officials managed to restore power several hours later, but at 1:05 pm on Tuesday the northern grid collapsed again, said Shailendre Dubey, an official at the Uttar Pradesh Power in India's largest state. About the same time, the eastern grid failed and then the northeastern grid followed, energy officials in those regions said. The grids serve more than half India's population.
In West Bengal, express trains and local electric trains were stopped at stations across the state of West Bengal on the eastern grid. Crowds of people thronged the stations, waiting for any transport to take them to their destinations.
Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee said it would take at least 10 to 12 hours to restore power and asked office workers to go home.
"The situation is very grave. We are doing everything to restore power," West Bengal Power Minister Manish Gupta said.
New Delhi's Metro rail system, which serves about 1.8 million people a day, immediately shut down for the second day in a row. Police said they managed to evacuate Delhi's busy Rajiv Chowk station in under half an hour before closing the shutters.
S.K. Jain, 54, said he was on his way to file his income tax return when the Metro closed and now would almost certainly miss the deadline. Hours later, the government announced it was giving taxpayers an extra month to file because of the chaos.
Tuesday's blackout eclipsed Monday's in India, which covered territory including 370 million people. The third largest blackout affected 100 million people in Indonesia in 2005, according to reports by The Associated Press.
India's demand for electricity has soared along with its economy in recent years, but utilities have been unable to meet the growing needs. India's Central Electricity Authority reported power deficits of more than 8 per cent in recent months.
In addition, vast amounts of power are pirated through unauthorized wiring that taps into the electrical system.
The power deficit was worsened by a weak monsoon that lowered hydroelectric generation and kept temperatures higher, further increasing electricity usage as people seek to cool off.
But any connection to the grid remains a luxury for many. One-third of India's households do not even have electricity to power a light bulb, according to last year's census.
AP
This article was found at: http://www.smh.com.au/world/620-million-without-power-indias-energy-crisis-as-grids-collapse-20120801-23dtk.html
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India hit by world's biggest blackout
- From: AP
- August 01, 2012
Traffic crawls in New Delhi's Connaught Place yesterday after signals stopped functioning following a failure in the Northern Power Grid. Source: AFP
A power cut takes out the fans at a hospital in Siliguri yesterday. Source: AFP
Indian women and children wait in a train at a railway station in New Delhi yesterday. Source: AFP
Men sleep under a blacked out information screen at a train station in New Delhi yesterday. Source: AFP
INDIA's energy crisis cascaded over half the country yesterday when three of its regional grids collapsed, leaving 620 million people without government-supplied electricity for several hours in, by far, the world's biggest-ever blackout.
Hundreds of trains stalled across the country and traffic lights went out, causing widespread traffic jams in New Delhi.
Electric crematoria stopped operating, some with bodies half burnt, power officials said. Emergency workers rushed generators to coal mines to rescue miners trapped underground.
The massive failure - a day after a similar, but smaller power failure - has raised serious concerns about India's outdated infrastructure and the government's inability to meet its huge appetite for energy as the country aspires to become a regional economic superpower.
Power Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde blamed the new crisis on states taking more than their allotted share of electricity.
"Everyone overdraws from the grid. Just this morning I held a meeting with power officials from the states and I gave directions that states that overdraw should be punished. We have given instructions that their power supply could be cut," he told reporters.
West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee said there were "hundreds" of miners trapped in Burdwan, about 180km northwest of Kolkata, where mines are operated by the government-owned Eastern Coalfields.
"We are trying to rescue the coal miners. All efforts are on to resume power supplies.
You need power supplies to run the lifts in the underground mines," Ms Banerjee said.
The new power failure affected 620 million people across 20 of India's 28 states. The blackout was unusual in its reach, stretching from the border with Burma in the northeast to the Pakistani border about 3000km away.
Its impact, however, was softened by Indians' familiarity with frequent blackouts and the widespread use of backup generators for major businesses and key facilities such as hospitals and airports.
Mr Shinde later said power was fully restored in the northeast grid four hours after it went down, and that the north grid had 45 per cent power and the east grid 35 per cent. R.N. Nayak, chairman of Power Grid Corporation, which runs the nation's power system, said he expected to have full power overnight.
The outages came just a day after India's northern power grid collapsed for several hours. Indian officials managed to restore power several hours later, but at 1.05pm (5.35pm AEST) yesterday the northern grid collapsed again, said Shailendre Dubey, an official at the Uttar Pradesh Power Corporation in India's largest state. About the same time, the eastern grid failed and then the northeastern grid followed. The grids serve more than half India's population.
In West Bengal, express trains and local electric trains were stopped at stations across the state of West Bengal on the eastern grid. Crowds of people thronged the stations, waiting for any transport to take them to their destinations.
Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee said it would take at least 10 to 12 hours to restore power and asked office workers to go home.
"The situation is very grave. We are doing everything to restore power," West Bengal Power Minister Manish Gupta said.
New Delhi's Metro rail system, which serves about 1.8 million people a day, immediately shut down for the second day in a row. Police said they managed to evacuate Delhi's busy Rajiv Chowk station in under half an hour before closing the shutters.
S.K. Jain, 54, said he was on his way to file his income tax return when the Metro closed and now would almost certainly miss the deadline.
Yesterday's blackout eclipsed Monday's in India, which covered territory including 370 million people. The third largest blackout affected 100 million people in Indonesia in 2005.
India's demand for electricity has soared along with its economy in recent years, but utilities have been unable to meet the growing needs. India's Central Electricity Authority reported power deficits of more than 8 per cent in recent months.
In addition, vast amounts of power are pirated through unauthorised wiring that taps into the electrical system.
The power deficit was worsened by a weak monsoon that lowered hydroelectric generation and kept temperatures higher, further increasing electricity usage as people seek to cool off.
But any connection to the grid remains a luxury for many. One-third of India's households do not even have electricity to power a light bulb, according to last year's census.
AP
Copyright 2011 News Limited. All times AEST (GMT +10).
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Second Indian power cut leaves 700m in the dark
Chaos again across large areas of a nation that cannot meet increasing demand for electricity
Delhi
Wednesday 01 August 2012
Rescue efforts to reach 60 miners stuck underground continued last night after a second massive power cut in as many days – thought to be the largest outage in history – brought chaos to India.
In developments that triggered a mixture of despair and incredulity, a day after the country's northern grid collapsed on Monday it did so again yesterday, followed shortly afterwards by the collapse of the eastern and north-eastern grids. At one point anywhere up to 700 million people in 20 Indian states, stretching from Kashmir to West Bengal, were without electricity.
Hundreds of trains ground to a halt and traffic lights went out, bringing chaos to many of the biggest cities. Electric crematoriums had to switch to using wood and businesses and hospitals had to rely on back-up generators.
One of the most intense dramas was playing out in the eastern states of West Bengal, where around 200 workers were stuck underground in three mines after the lifts used to bring them to the surface stopped working when the power died. A similar incident occurred in Jharkhand in eastern India where 65 men were trapped.
Yesterday evening it was reported that the 200 miners stuck in Burdwan, around 120 miles north-west of Kolkata, had been rescued. But operations continued in Jharkhand where six of 65 miners trapped at four sites in the Dhanbad area had been rescued. "We are hopeful of evacuating all others soon," Tapas Kumar Lahiry of Eastern Coalfields Ltd told The Times of India.
As with Monday's blackout, which affected around 330 million people, there was no definitive explanation for what caused the collapse of the grid. Politicians engaged in a blame game, with some accusing various states of overdrawing from the national grid.
The Power Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde said the crisis was the fault of states such as Uttar Pradesh (UP), which had taken more than their agreed share. "Everyone overdraws from the grid.
This morning I held a meeting with power officials and I gave directions that states that overdraw should be punished," he told reporters. "We have given instructions that their power supply could be cut." The state of UP denied the allegations.
While the Prime Minister's office remained silent about the crisis, many observers noted with irony the announcement that Mr Shinde was to be promoted to the home ministry in a government reshuffle.
The opposition Bharatiya Janata Party said the blackouts were evidence of mismanagement and demanded an apology from the Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh.
Whatever the cause of yesterday's collapse, at its root is India's often-debilitating electricity deficit of somewhere around 12 per cent. So-called load-shedding, the deliberate shutdown of electricity in some areas to avoid total blackouts, is commonplace, especially in rural areas and on the fringes of the cities. Two areas where power cuts are rare are Gujarat and the central parts of Mumbai.
"The cause of this is very well known – the country does not have sufficient power and on top of this demand is increasing very fast. It's a mismatch between demand and supply," said Shadid Hasan, a director of the Energy and Resources Institute in Delhi.
"If you have certain states drawing more than their allotted share then it can trigger this collapse."
In Delhi, the city's metro was again closed and thousands of people were forced to try and make their way home either by car, bus or on foot. By mid-afternoon, roads in many parts of the city were approaching gridlock.
By yesterday evening power had been restored to many parts of the capital, though not all parts of country were so fortunate.
In West Bengal, where inter-city and local electric trains were stopped at stations, the chief minister Mamata Banerjee said it would take up to 12 hours to restore power.
The state's power minister, Manish Gupta, said: "The situation is very grave. We are doing everything to restore power."
@independent.co.uk
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From “The Telegraph” (UK) website”:
World's biggest ever blackout as India is brought to a standstill
The world's biggest ever blackout brought half of India to a standstill, as a catastrophic power outage left 670 million people without electricity.
6:16PM BST 31 Jul 2012
From the border with Burma in the northeast to the Pakistani frontier in the west almost 2,000 miles away Indians described post-apocalyptic scenes as trains juddered to a halt, cars became snarled in gridlock and some 200 miners were trapped underground.
The standstill is deeply embarrassing for the nuclear-armed nation, that considers itself the emerging superpower in the democratic world.
In the capital New Delhi, overheated crowds, struggling with temperatures of up to 114.8F (46C), descended on air-conditioned shopping malls powered by diesel generators until security guards were forced to close the doors fearing a crush inside.
Even electric furnaces in crematoria shut down without warning, leaving bodies half burned.
While Indians have become used to frequent power cuts caused by crumbling infrastructure, nobody was prepared for three regional grids, serving half the 1.2 billion population, to collapse entirely.
Officials described a "cascade", as first the overloaded northern grid sucked energy from the eastern grid, which eventually began drawing on the north-eastern network, bringing all three down, affecting half the country.
Two hundred miners were stranded in three deep shafts in the state of West Bengal when electric lifts stopped working.
An official with Eastern Coalfields Limited said the workers were not in danger and were being brought to safety.
Sushil Kumar Shinde, the Indian power minister, blamed the crisis on states taking more than their allotted share of electricity.
"Every state draws far more than their specified quotas from the power grid. We will penalise those provinces that transgress these limits and if they persist their power supplies would be cut," he told reporters at a hastily summoned news conference in Delhi.
The announcement turned out to be one of his final acts in the job. Having presided over two days of disaster and with power supplies only gradually flickering back in the afternoon, he was promoted to Home Minister, one of the government's top jobs.
Officials said the reshuffle had been planned well in advance but the decision will further anger a population wondering when the next breakdown will come.
India's demand for electricity has soared in recent years as its economy grew rapidly, leaving utilities struggling to keep up. The country's Central Electricity Authority has reported power deficits of more than eight per cent in recent months.
That the deficit has worsened in recent weeks because of poor monsoon rains, which have both disrupted output from hydropower schemes and nudged temperatures higher, increasing demand for air conditioners.
Less rain has also prompted farmers to rely on electric pumps to irrigate their land.
On Monday, the northern grid collapsed for six hours causing massive disruption across nine states. On Tuesday, 20 out of 29 states were affected.
Towns and cities across the country reported similar problems with roads and trains, while essential services such as a hospitals, telephone exchanges and airports switched to emergency generators.
Sharad Sharma, an information technology expert in Lucknow, about 300 miles south-east of Delhi, said the blame lay with the government.
"There is no accountability and no one in authority or government we can turn to for help," he said. "Life is becoming unlivable by the day and it's more than possible that similar outages will occur again soon"
Opposition parties seized the opportunity to berate the government of Manmohan Singh, the prime minister over the power failure.
"Nobody in government takes responsibility for such a disaster. It's a complete policy paralysis and one that will impinge on India's declining economic prospects" said Prakash Javdekar, spokesman for the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party.
Business leaders also said the two consecutive days of power failures would harm factory production and deliveries across the industrial north – further stalling the country's lacklustre growth this year.
Shashank Joshi, Research Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, said the government had recognised that infrastructure was the Achilles' heel of India's rise but that misallocation of resources, provincial rivalries and poor planning had hampered investment.
"Even if the grid had not failed, you still have a quarter of Indians without electricity, you still have an increasing supply-demand gap opening up over the next several years," he said.
By Tuesday evening, electricity had been restored in parts of Delhi and the southern and western grids had begun supplying power to help plug gaps in services.
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India blackouts leave 700 million without power
Power cuts plunge 20 of India's 28 states into darkness as energy suppliers fail to meet growing demand
- Helen Pidd in Delhi
- guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 31 July 2012 15.48 BST
More than 700 million people in India have been left without power in the world's worst blackout of recent times, leading to fears that protests and even riots could follow if the country's electricity supply continues to fail to meet growing demand.
Twenty of India's 28 states were hit by power cuts, along with the capital, New Delhi, when three of the country's five electricity grids failed at lunchtime.
As engineers struggled for hours to fix the problem, hundreds of trains failed, leaving passengers stranded along thousands of miles of track from Kashmir in the north to Nagaland on the eastern border with Burma.
Traffic lights went out, causing jams in New Delhi, Kolkata and other cities. Surgical operations were cancelled across the country, with nurses at one hospital just outside Delhi having to operate life-saving equipment manually when back-up generators failed.
Elsewhere, electric crematoriums stopped operating, some with bodies left half burnt before wood was brought in to stoke the furnaces.
As Delhiites sweated in 89% humidity and drivers honked their horns even more impatiently than usual, in West Bengal the power cut left hundreds of miners trapped underground for hours when their lifts broke down. All the state's government workers were sent home after the chief minister announced it would take 10 to 12 hours for the power to return.
First to fail was India's northern grid, which had also collapsed the previous day leaving an estimated 350 million people in the dark for up to 14 hours. It was quickly followed by the eastern grid, which includes Kolkata, then the north-eastern grid.
An estimated 710 million people live in the affected area, ever more of whom require electricity as they snap up the air-conditioning units, flat-screen TVs and other gadgets that have become status symbols among India's burgeoning middle class.
The two consecutive blackouts raised serious concerns about India's infrastructure and the government's ability to meet the nation's increasing appetite for energy as it aspires to become an economic superpower.
The power minister, Sushilkumar Shinde, blamed the latest collapse on states taking more than their allotted share of electricity. "Everyone overdraws from the grid. Just this morning I held a meeting with power officials from the states and I gave directions that states that overdraw should be punished. We have given instructions that their power supply could be cut," he said.
In a curiously timed move, the government announced on Tuesday that Shinde had been promoted to the home affairs ministry. The power brief was given to a minister who already had a job he was expected to keep – Veerappa Moily, corporate affairs minister.
Opposition parties were quick to make political capital out of the power crisis. "This is a
manifestation of mismanagement – the prime minister owes an answer to the people of this country," a spokesman for the Bharatiya Janata (BJP) party said. Manmohan Singh, India's prime minister, did not comment. remained silent on the matter on Tuesday.
Citizens could take to the streets if the blackouts continue, warned Harry Dhaul, director general of the Independent Power Producers Association of India, a non-governmental organisation that campaigns for improvement of the Indian power sector: "There will obviously be some agitation in urban areas, which have become very reliant on electricity … There could be riots; there could be protests."
At the beginning of July, repeated power cuts during a spell of 40C-plus heat prompted hundreds of residents to vandalise electricity substations in the new city of Gurgaon just outside Delhi. Rioters beat up energy company officials, holding some of them hostage and blocking roads in several parts of the city.
But despite howls of protest from those whose TVs and computers were not working this week, one-third of India's households do not even have electricity to power a light bulb, according to the 2011 census.
A large minority of those in the blackout zone have never been connected to any grid – just 16.4% of the 100 million people who live in the central-eastern state of Bihar have access to electricity, compared with 96.6% in Punjab in the west.
India's demand for electricity has soared along with its economy in recent years, but utilities have been unable to meet the growing needs. India's Central Electricity Authority has reported power deficits of more than 8% in recent months.
Greenpeace said the blackout was "an eye opener that the present energy infrastructure in India needs to be diversified, both at the generation and the distribution level".
Tuesday's power deficit was worsened by a weak monsoon that has lowered hydroelectric generation and kept temperatures higher, further increasing electricity usage as people try to cool off.
Experts agree India must invest in its power infrastructure to meet the needs of its 1.2 billion people – and to keep up with China, its only serious rival as a future global superpower alongside the US.
Since 2006, China has added about six times more power than India to its national grid each year: an average of 84 gigawatts for China to 14 gigawatts for India, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Dhaul said the reason India had not kept pace with China was not a lack of political will but the fact that India is a democracy. "In China, if they want to build a hydroelectric dam and someone complains about it, it doesn't matter – in 24 hours he has been relocated and the building work starts. We can't do that in India," he said.
By early evening, 50 of the trapped miners in West Bengal had been rescued and power had been restored to the north-east of the country, as well the most affluent areas of Delhi, such as the grand colonial neighbourhood built by Edwin Lutyens, home to many politicians and diplomats. The super-rich are less affected by the power cuts that are an almost daily occurrence in much of India. They can afford diesel-powered generators and power inverters that can keep basic electrics such as lights and fans working.
But the generators require fuel, which can be scarce during a blackout. The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday that at a major hospital in Gurgaon, the backup generators failed after prolonged use. This forced nurses to manually operate life-saving equipment such as ventilators for about 15 patients. "We were lucky that no lives were lost," a senior doctor said. "The generators came back up in about 20 minutes."
India has five electricity grids – northern, eastern, north-eastern, southern and western.
All are interconnected, except the southern grid. The northern grid covers nine regions:
Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan, Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, and Chandigarh.
At least six states are covered by the eastern grid: West Bengal, Chattisgarh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Orissa and Sikkim; the north-eastern grid connects Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Assam, Meghalaya, Manipur, Mizoram and Tripura.
- © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.
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Indian blackouts: the democracy that takes power from the people
While politicians argued in Delhi, those who elected them were left let down and sweating in their homes
- Randeep Ramesh
- guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 31 July 2012 18.42 BST
A teacher conducts a lesson for students during a power cut inside a house in Kolkata. Photograph: Rupak De Chowdhuri/REUTERS
To leave one in 20 people on the globe's surface without electricity, that lifeblood of modern society, in the hairdryer heat of an Indian summer is unfortunate. To do it again to one in 12 of the world's population a day later is an unpardonable carelessness.
Yet while politicians argued in Delhi, across the cowbelt of northern India more than 600 million were left to perspire in underground trains, shopping malls, offices, restaurants and homes. A few decades ago this was hardly news: it is fair to say that things rarely worked in the India of yesterday. Frequent blackouts meant the insides of fridges were invariably hotter than the air outside them. When the first modern cars arrived families took to riding around – so they could enjoy air-conditioning.
Even today half of rural India, where most of the country lives, is not connected to the electricity grid. However things have been changing – and that is part of the problem.
Thanks to India's economy – which will expand by 6.5% this year, a growth rate which dwarfs the western world's snail-like performance – the country's middle-class homes are stocked with air conditioners, flat-screen televisions, microwaves and computers. There's just not enough electricity to run them all.
Despite its soaring energy needs, India has one of the lowest per capita rates of consumption of power in the world – 734 kWh power consumed per person a year as compared to a world average of 2,429.
The reasons are both old and new. Despite ploughing $130bn (£80bn) into the power industry in the past five years, India's infrastructure remains dilapidated or nonexistent. Getting the funds to invest is difficult when the poor often steal electricity and politicians dish out free power to wealthy farmers at election time.
Only a tenth of the power sector is in private hands, which may lead some to believe the state would act in the interests of the very poorest. Quite the opposite has occurred. Electricity companies are headed by bureaucrats and run like government departments with little accountability to consumers and a disturbing tolerance for bribes. It is absurd given the size and scale of the blackout that the minister in charge is likely to be promoted in a forthcoming government reshuffle.
This serves as an unappealing backdrop to this week's misery, which was almost certainly sparked by the lax attitude of the government and officials of India's most populous state, Uttar Pradesh. The newly-elected administration appears not to have made any contingency plans in case its hydroelectric dams ran dry.
After a poor monsoon season, this is exactly the predicament the state – along with other smaller northern regions – found themselves in. So Uttar Pradesh drew on the national grid to meet demand it could not fulfil. In doing so it overloaded first its own grid and then set off a cascade of system collapses across northern India.
Power, so vital for growth, is India's biggest bottleneck. It is a paradox that in China unelected leaders are careful to provide the masses with material benefits such as electricity, water and roads because they legitimise dictatorship. Whereas in India, democracy allows just the opposite: free elections excuse the political class from providing the basics of life to the masses who have elected them.
Randeep Ramesh
• Randeep Ramesh was the Guardian's south Asia correspondent from 2003-2009
- © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.
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India's blackouts: the real power failure
India is an increasingly rich country that fails to invest in its sources of wealth
- Editorial
- guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 31 July 2012 23.38 BST
Even as India suffered a huge electricity blackout on Tuesday, with about 700 million people deprived of light, fans (in 30C heat) and trains, it was good to see that Indians had not lost their readiness to crack a joke. Here is one that has been doing the rounds this week: Q. What do you call a power failure in Delhi? A. Manmohan Singh.
As one-liners go, that is rather unfair, yet utterly right. Unjust because the Indian prime minister's main fault in this affair is to be in charge when things went so badly wrong. Sometimes unworldly, often indecisive, Mr Singh remains one of Delhi's good guys: a progressive and an intellectual in a political system that all too often rewards the opposite qualities. Where the joke hits its mark, however, is in pinning the blame for this latest fiasco on India's political classes.
This is true in both the narrowest sense and in a much broader one. For proof of the former, look no further than this: rather than apologise for two days during which 20 of India's 28 provincial states suffered blackouts, the country's power minister, Sushil Kumar Shinde, blamed the states themselves for "overdraw" of electricity. Instead of sorting out this mess, the unimpressive Mr Shinde was promoted on Tuesday afternoon to home minister. Whatever the unadmirable qualities of contemporary British politics, imagine any cabinet minister failing to apologise for presiding over such a first-class foul-up, then being awarded a promotion.
Such, sadly, is the typical high-handedness of India's political classes, who too often lack any sense of obligation to their voters.
That lack of connection can be seen in the broader politics of this week's debacle. There cannot have been an intelligent MP in the Lok Sabha (India's House of Commons) who did not see this power crunch coming. Indeed, the power grid that serves Delhi and the northern part of the country collapsed in 2001. As the country has enjoyed record growth over the past decade, the demands for power have grown – and so too the imperative to plan for energy needs. Little of this has happened. As the novelist Amit Chaudhuri remarked in these pages, India is an increasingly rich country that fails to invest in its sources of wealth: roads, health, schools, power. The result is a nation that has prospered (in parts and very unequally) despite the state, not because of it. Middle-class Indians have sent their children to English-medium private schools, who have gone on to jobs at multinationals who lay on private healthcare, private transport – and private schooling.
This is not some paean to privatisation; it is simply a reflection of how a governing class has let down the people it is meant to serve. Power may return to India this week; political power in Delhi is overdue for radical reform.
- © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.
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From “The Diplomat” website:
India Hit With Major Blackout
By Sanjay Kumar
July 31, 2012
More than half of India came to a standstill on Tuesday when three power grids failed in Northern and Eastern India. One grid collapsed for the second day in a row. This is the second time since 2001 such a massive breakdown has taken place, with this one affecting more than 650 million people across 20 different states in the country.
New Delhi has witnessed large traffic jams in major parts of the city as a result of road signals being out. The metro service grinded to a halt leading to chaos all around as commuters were left stranded. The overcast weather and rain only exacerbated their woes.
This was the second day in a row that electrical outrages have struck the metropolis after the Northern grid first collapsed on Sunday. Before it was fully back on line the grid collapsed again, overwhelming the residents of India’s capital.
Other parts of Northern and Eastern India were also suffering on Tuesday with trains and bus services down in large sways of the affected areas. According to one report more than 300 trains came to an abrupt halt. Hospitals all across the affected areas were badly hit with most of them only maintaining electricity for emergency services through diesel generators.
There were other reports of around 200 miners getting trapped inside a coal mine in the eastern Indian city of Asansol but they have since been rescused. This freeded emergency service personnel to focus on 65 miners who are still trapped in the nearby Jharkhand mine.
Outgoing Power Minister Shushil Kumar Shinde blamed the state governments for this massive power failure. According to him, the main reason the Northern and Eastern grids failed was because state governments in those areas use so much power. However, Uttar Pradesh, presumably the culprit state, has denied drawing extra powers from the national grid.
In India, state governments have their own power generation units and they buy power from the central grids in order to offset the deficit.
The breakdown of the power grids underlines the weakness of aging power stations and the massive gap of supply for a growing country. This is one of the major areas where infrastructure is weak and needs urgent attention.
