500 Million Indians without juice

Anything and everything anytime

BBC

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 was hit by the power cuts 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.

With so many areas without air conditioning, some Indians decided to jump the train and head to the beach.