On Tuesday, India suffered the largest electrical
blackout in history, affecting an area encompassing about 670 million people,
or roughly 10 percent of the world’s population. Three of the country’s
interconnected northern power grids collapsed for several hours, as blackouts
extended almost 2,000 miles, from India’s eastern border with Myanmar to its
western border with Pakistan.
For a country considered a rising economic power,
Blackout Tuesday — which came only a day after another major power failure —
was an embarrassing reminder of the intractable problems still plaguing India:
inadequate infrastructure, a crippling power shortage and, many critics say, a
yawning absence of governmental action and leadership.
India’s coalition government, already battered for
its stewardship of a wobbling economy, again found itself on the defensive, as
top ministers could not definitively explain what had caused the grid failure
or why it had happened on consecutive days.
Theories for the extraordinarily extensive
blackout across much of northern India included excessive demands placed on the
grid from certain regions, due in part to low monsoon rains that forced farmers
to pump more water to their fields, and the less plausible possibility that
large solar flares had set off a failure.
By Tuesday evening, power had been restored in
most regions, and many people in major cities barely noticed the disruption,
because localized blackouts are so common that many businesses, hospitals,
offices and middle-class homes are equipped with backup diesel fuel generators.
But that did not prevent people from being
furious, especially after the government chose Tuesday to announce a
long-awaited cabinet reshuffle — in which the power minister was promoted to
take over the Home Affairs Ministry, one of the country’s most important
positions.
“This is a huge failure,” said Prakash Javadekar, a spokesman for the
opposition Bharatiya Janata Party. “It is a management failure as well as a
failure of policy. It is policy paralysis in the power sector.”
For millions of ordinary people, Tuesday brought
frustration and anger; for some, there was fear. As nighttime arrived, Kirti
Shrivastava, 49, a housewife in the eastern city of Patna, said power had not
been restored in her neighborhood.
“There is no water, no idea when electricity will return,” she said.
“We are really tense. Even the shops have now closed. Now we hope it is not an
invitation to the criminals!”
Tuesday also brought havoc to India’s railroad
network, one of the busiest in the world. Across the country, hundreds of
trains were stalled on the tracks for hours before service resumed. At the
bustling New Delhi Railway Station, Jaswant Kaur, 62, found herself stranded
after a miserable day. Her initial train was stopped by the power failure. By
the time she reached New Delhi, her connecting train was already gone.
“Now my pocket is empty,” she said. “I am hungry. I am tired. The
government is responsible.”
Sushil Kumar Shinde, the power minister, who spoke
to reporters in the afternoon, did not specify what caused the grid breakdown
but blamed several northern states for consuming too much power from the
national system.
“I have asked my officers to penalize those states which are drawing
more power than their quota,” said Mr. Shinde, whose promotion was announced a
few hours later.
Surendra Rao, formerly India’s top electricity
regulator, said the national grid had a sophisticated system of circuit
breakers that should have prevented such a blackout. But he attributed this
week’s problems to the bureaucrats who control the system, saying that civil
servants are beholden to elected state leaders who demand that more power be
diverted to their regions — even if doing so threatens the stability of the
national grid.
“The dispatchers at both the state and the regional level should have
cut off the customers who were overdrawing, and they didn’t,” Mr. Rao said.
“That has to be investigated.”
India’s power sector has long been considered a
potentially crippling hindrance to the country’s economic prospects. Part of
the problem is access; more than 300 million people in India still have no
electricity.
But India’s power generation capacity also has not
kept pace with growth; in March, for example, demand outpaced supply by 10.2
percent, according to government statistics.
In recent years, India’s government has set
ambitious goals for expanding power generation capacity, and while new plants
have come online, many more have faced delays, whether because of bureaucratic
entanglements, environmental concerns or other problems. India depends on coal
for more than half of its power generation, but production has barely
increased, meaning that some power plants are idled for lack of coal.
Many analysts have long predicted that India’s
populist politics were creating an untenable situation in the power sector,
because the government is selling electricity at prices lower than the cost of
generating it. India’s public distribution utilities are now in deep debt,
which makes it more difficult to encourage investment in the power sector.
Tuesday’s blackout struck some analysts as evidence of a system in distress.
“It’s like a day of reckoning coming nearer,” said Rajiv Kumar,
secretary general of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and
Industry.
India’s major business centers of Mumbai,
Bangalore and Hyderabad were not affected by the blackout, since they are in
the southern and central parts of the country that proved to be immune from the
failure.
Phillip F. Schewe, a specialist in electricity and
author of the book “The Grid: A Journey Through the Heart of Our Electrified
World,” said the demand pressures on India’s system could set off the sort of
breakdown that occurred on Tuesday.
In cases when demand outstrips the power supply,
the system of circuit breakers must be activated, often manually, to reduce
some of the load in what are known as rolling blackouts. But if workers cannot
trip those breakers fast enough, Mr. Schewe said a failure could cascade into a
much larger blackout.
Some experts attributed excessive demand in part
to the lower levels of monsoon rains falling on India this year, which has
reduced the capacity of hydroelectric power and forced many farmers to turn to
electric pumps to draw water from underground.
It was unclear how long it would take to restore
power fully in areas still lacking it — or if the problem would recur later
this week. In Lucknow, capital of India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh,
Dr. Sachendra Raj said his private hospital was using two large, rented
generators to maintain enough electricity for air-conditioners and dialysis
machines.
“It’s a very common problem,” he said of power failures. “It’s part
and parcel of our daily life.”
Meanwhile, about 200 coal miners in the state of
West Bengal were stranded for several hours in underground mines when the
electricity to the elevators was shut off, according to reports in the Indian
news media.
“We are waiting for the restoration of power to bring them up through
the lifts, but there is no threat to their lives or any reason to panic,” said
Nildari Roy, a senior official at Eastern Coalfields Ltd., which operates the
mine. By late evening, most of the miners had been rescued, news agencies reported.
Ramachandra Guha, an Indian historian, said that
the blackout was only the latest evidence of government dysfunction in India.
On Monday, he noted, 32 people died in a train fire in the state of Tamil Nadu
— a reminder that the nation’s railway system, like the electrical system, is
underfinanced and in dire need of upgrading.
“India needs to stop strutting on the world stage like it’s a great
power,” Mr. Guha said, “and focus on its deep problems within.”
