It had all the makings of a disaster movie:
More than half a billion people without power. Trains motionless on the tracks.
Miners trapped underground. Subway lines paralyzed. Traffic snarled in much of
the national capital.
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.”
