Outage leaves hundreds of millions without power in India

In what has been viewed as one of the world's largest ever power cuts, hundreds...

12:01 01 August 2012

In what has been viewed as one of the world's largest ever power cuts, hundreds of millions of people have been left without electricity in northern and eastern India. 

 

A huge breakdown across three massive grids has resulted in more than half of the country being left in the dark. 

 

The problems are far more widespread as trains (which form the transport backbone) are at a standstill. 

 

Hospitals are being forced to run on backup generators while nearly 200 miners in eastern India are stranded underground as there is no power to retrieve them. 

 

In all, the blunders in the northern, eastern, and north-eastern grids will account for roughly 600m people being affected.

 

As yet there has been no official response as to why the grids have gone down but some have speculated they were overloaded. 

 

The first cut came on Monday daytime and engineers fixed it by the evening but the following day the northern grid collapsed again. The eastern grid also went down around the same time. 

 

Officials state that 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.

 

While cuts are fairly common considering the country's ageing infrastructure and increased consumption of power as its economy has boosted, this is the first major outage since 2001.