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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