A massive power failure hit India for the second day on Tuesday, as three national grids collapsed, blacking out more than half the country in an unprecedented outage affecting over 600 million people.
Hundreds of miners were trapped underground in the eastern state of West Bengal when the lifts failed, metro services were stopped temporarily in the capital and hundreds of trains were held up nationwide. “The north, northeastern and the eastern grids are down but we are working and we will have them restored shortly,” Naresh Kumar, a spokesman at the Power Grid Corporation of India Ltd, told AFP.
Federal Power Minister Sushilkumar Shinde told reporters that the monster outage, which struck around 1:00 pm (0730 GMT) in the middle of the working day, was caused by states drawing power “beyond their permissible limits”. There appeared to have been a domino effect, with the overloaded northern grid drawing too heavily on the eastern grid which in turn led the northeastern network to collapse.
An area stretching from the western border with Pakistan to the far northeastern state of Arunachal Pradesh next to China was affected, with the huge cities of New Delhi, Kolkata and Lucknow suffering without supplies. “Half the country is without power. It’s a situation totally without precedent,” said Vivek Pandit, an energy expert at the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry. Power was gradually flickering back in some areas several hours after the crisis struck and Power Grid Corp. chairman R N Nayak promised that the problems would be rectified by 7.00pm (1330 GMT).
“Our message to people is ‘they are in safe hands, we have been in the job for years’,” Nayak told reporters at a news conference during which he apologised for the disruption. In New Delhi, the metro train system came to a standstill for a few hours and traffic lights went out, causing chaos for a second day after a failure on the northern grid on Monday which caused the worst outage in more than a decade. On the streets, people seethed over the lack of air conditioning, crashed computer systems and missed deliveries.
“I had been waiting for a shipment of stock to arrive since morning and now I’m told it will be delayed indefinitely,” said furious Delhi businessman Anshul Aggarwal.