Half of India's population at 1.2 billion were without power on Tuesday as grids broke down. More than 600 million people have been left without power in the second major blackout in days and the grids cover 19 states reaching from Assam to the Himalayas to Rajasthan. This has been the worst power outage in more than a decade
R.N. Nayak, chairman of the Power Grid Corporation said to NBCNews.com, "Even before we could figure out the reason for yesterday's failure, we had more grid failures today."
There have been a series of serious incidences that have occurred because of the power outage. Two hundred miners were stranded in three deep coal shafts in West Bengal when the power stopped working and trapped them in their electric elevators. Train stations in Kolkata were overflowing with traffic jams after government offices closed early and the power has also failed to work in many city hospitals.
Currently Indian's grid is still in development and an estimated 300 million Indians do not have routine access to electricity. Many business employees also have backup generators in case of situations like this.
There still hasn't been a real revelation upon why the power failure was caused in the first place. While some government officials has blamed some northern states for pulling more power from the national grid than they were allotted, India struggles to generate enough power of its own to fuel businesses and homes.
Surendra Rao, who was the chairman of the Central Electricity Regulatory Commission in 2001, when the nation's last major blackout occurred said to the New York Times that the system of circuit breakers should have prevented power failures on Monday and Tuesday but people manning the breakers are "beholden to state government officials, who are loath to have the power in their locality shut off - the usual prescription when power surges threaten 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. That has to be investigated," said Rao.
The power failure is still currently being repaired.
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