Hundreds of millions without power in India

[88m3]

July 2012 Last updated at 11:35 ET
Hundreds of millions without power in India

Hundreds of millions of people have been left without electricity in northern and eastern India after a massive power breakdown.

More than half the country has been left without power after three grids collapsed - one for a second day.

Hundreds of trains have come to a standstill and hospitals are running on backup generators.

The country's power minister has blamed the crisis on states drawing too much power from the national grid.

The breakdowns in the northern, eastern, and north-eastern grids mean around 600m people have been affected in 20 of India's states.
Traffic jams

In a statement on national TV on Tuesday evening, Power Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde said he had appealed to states to stop trying to take more than their quota of power.

"I have also instructed my officials to penalise the states which overdraw from the grid," he said.

Media reports in India have suggested that Uttar Pradesh is among the states that government officials have been blaming for the grid collapse.

But officials in the state denied this, saying there was "no reason to believe that any power operations in Uttar Pradesh triggered it".

Anil K Gupta, the chairman of the state's power company, called for "further investigation to ascertain the real cause".

Also on Tuesday it was announced that Mr Shinde had been promoted to the post of home minister, in a widely anticipated cabinet reshuffle.
'Complete mess'

By late on Tuesday, officials said the north-eastern grid was fully up and running. The northern grid was running at 75% capacity and the eastern at 40%.

In Delhi, Metro services were halted and staff evacuated trains. Many traffic lights in the city failed, leading to massive traffic jams.

Much of the country's railway network has started moving again, although a full service is not expected for many hours and there is a huge backlog to clear.

The failure on the northern grid on Monday also caused severe disruption and travel chaos across northern India.

One shopworker in Delhi, Anu Chopra, 21, said: "I can understand this happening once in a while but how can one allow such a thing to happen two days in a row?

"It just shows our infrastructure is in a complete mess. There is no transparency and no accountability whatsoever."

In eastern India, around 200 miners were trapped underground as lifts failed, but officials later said they had all been rescued.
Ageing grid

Addressing a news conference earlier on Tuesday, the chairman of the Power Grid Corporation of India said the exact cause of the power cut was unclear, he said, but that it appeared to be due to the "interconnection of grids".

"We have to see why there was a sudden increase in load... we will make sure that such a situation is not repeated," he said.

"Our message to people is that they are in safe hands, we have been in the job for years."

After Monday's cut, engineers managed to restore electricity to the northern grid by the evening, but at 13:05 (07:35 GMT) on Tuesday, it collapsed again.

The eastern grid failed around the same time, officials said, followed by the north-eastern grid.

Areas affected include Delhi, Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh and Rajasthan in the north, and West Bengal, Bihar, Orissa and Jharkhand in the east.

Smriti Mehra, who works at the Bank Of India in Delhi, said it had to turn customers away.

"There is no internet, nothing is working. It is a total breakdown of everything in our office," she told AFP.

Across West Bengal, power went at 13:00 and all suburban railway trains on the eastern railways ground to a halt from Howrah and Seladah stations, the BBC's Rahul Tandon reports from Calcutta.

However, the city is not badly affected as it is served by a private electricity board, our correspondent adds.

Power cuts are common in Indian cities because of a fundamental shortage of power and an ageing grid - the chaos caused by such cuts has led to protests and unrest on the streets in the past.

But the collapse of an entire grid is rare - the last time the northern grid failed was in 2001.

India's demand for electricity has soared in recent years as its economy has grown but its power infrastructure has been unable to meet the growing needs.

Correspondents say unless there is a huge investment in the power sector, the country will see many more power failures.

Are you in the affected regions? Send us your comments and experiences using the form below.

Send your pictures and videos to yourpics@bbc.co.uk or text them to 61124 (UK) or +44 7624 800 100 (International). If you have a large file you can upload here.

You're in my thoughts zerozero


BBC News - Hundreds of millions without power in India

 

[RJY33]

surprised this isnt a bigger story. 600 million plus without power? interesting to see what would happen here if even a 1/4 of the country lost power for 2 days

 

[Dusty Bake Activate]

Thomas Friedman

Hope Zerozero's okay. This fukked up the planned podcast. Ironically the last one was about the need to move away from fossils fuels like in this case, coal.

Zero check in with us when you can.

 

[88m3]

Just saw on france24 it's the largest blackout in history.

 

[zerozero]

yeah we're doing good, thanks guys. I think it's possible to overstate the problem, a six-seven hour outage is not unmanageable by indian standards, the problem is more about how widespread the collapse is like they said stranding trains and hospitals etc

but yeah it's laughable that indians want to compare to china considering the sham that is our infrastructure

 

[88m3]

yeah we're doing good, thanks guys. I think it's possible to overstate the problem, a six-seven hour outage is not unmanageable by indian standards, the problem is more about how widespread the collapse is like they said stranding trains and hospitals etc

but yeah it's laughable that indians want to compare to china considering the sham that is our infrastructure

Isn't it like 40 celsius breh?



On a brighter note I'm sure the Chinese don't report when they have outages and it was probably built with slave labor.



On a darker note

Indian Sweatshop Worker Has To Work In The Dark Now Too

NEW DELHI—Following the ongoing power outage that has left more than 680 million people in India without electricity, 17-year-old sweatshop worker Bhavesh Abdul-Haafiz told reporters today he has now been forced to work his grueling, inhumane job in the dark on top of everything else. "Allah, are you testing me?" Abdul-Haafiz reportedly said to himself while struggling to hand-stitch the right sleeve onto an Adidas T-shirt in pitch-black darkness. "It's bad enough having to work 19 hours straight in 35-degree heat for almost no pay, but now I have to stumble around in the dark like a moron, too? Terrific." Abdul-Haafiz then quickly remembered his starving family, calmed himself down, and continued to quietly and diligently work deep into the night.

 

[Type Username Here]

Anytime I hear "BRIC" I feel like the other 3 countries are being disrespected.

India's economy might be picking up but their infrastructure, poverty and sanitation situations are out of fukking control.

 

[RicanFury]

Anytime I hear "BRIC" I feel like the other 3 countries are being disrespected.

India's economy might be picking up but their infrastructure, poverty and sanitation situations are out of fukking control.

zero first off hope u doing ok and glad u checked in. tell how bad is the sanitation over there? we be seeing pics of people swimming with bloated dead bodies in that river and shyt swamps. that shyt really like that all over india?

 

[alybaba]

There's no power in the Pakistani Punjab for 12-18 hours a day sometimes during the summer. Yall will be fine.

 

[Ready2Run]

Last time I was in India, there wasn't any power for around 10 hours a day
Its normal for my family there, if you have a back-up generator that runs on a tractor you should be ok

 

[The Real]

There's no power in the Pakistani Punjab for 12-18 hours a day sometimes during the summer. Yall will be fine.

18 hours??



I mean, I've been through 2-3 day blackouts here in the US, and when you grow up without much money, you know that your neighborhood can randomly lose power and be low priority for repairs, but I can't imagine doing that in that kind of weather.

 

[Julius Skrrvin]

hang in there indian brehthren

 

[Akuma]

Spoiler

Spoiler

Imagine what it SMELLED LIKE when to power was out.

Didnt INDIA announce years ago they were going to convert to solar and nuclear (Higgs-Boson?) power to get off the coal/oil bandwagon?

Higgs Boson has been documented for 1000's of years by the Buddhist and Egyptian artifacts. Now the power that be have some concrete proof, BUT THEY CANNOT LIMIT PARTICLE THEORY LIKE THEY DO FOSSIL FUELS.

 

[alybaba]

18 hours??



I mean, I've been through 2-3 day blackouts here in the US, and when you grow up without much money, you know that your neighborhood can randomly lose power and be low priority for repairs, but I can't imagine doing that in that kind of weather.

Yup. There has been no additional capacity added in Punjab, the gov't there has fukked around with Independent Power Producers as it is and then some of the industrialists also use their political connections to steal electricity etc.

Luckily in Karachi, the utility was privatized a few years ago and they actually invested in additional generation capacity, and now they distribute power based on collections, so my area gets barely 2-3 hours of power cuts during the peak season.

 

[unit321]

California got in the same situation and did rolling brown outs. They should have done this in India. But instead, they blew out the O-ring like a new "cute" inmate at Supermax fed penitentiary.

This would be ultra suck, and I have been in storm-caused black outs before.