600 mn Indians suffer worst power grid failure

NEW DELHI, INDIA: The tripping of the Northern supply grid on Monday triggered a cascading effect Tuesday afternoon, leading to the Eastern and North-Eastern power supply grids going down in an never-seen-before power crisis across 19 states of India.

Haryana, Punjab, Rajasthan, J&K, Bihar, Odisha, Jharkhand, West Bengal, UP, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Delhi and the seven North-Eastern states were the ones facing a blackout on Tuesday.

After the outage of the Northern grid, the Eastern grid followed suit and within an hour after that, the North-Eastern grid tripped, thereby rendering about 600 million Indians 'powerless'. In one of the world's largest power failures reportedly triggered by the overconsumption of power by Haryana, Punjab, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh, even train services came to an abrupt halt across the northern parts of the country.

According to reports, Metro services on all six lines in Delhi had stopped, but the Kolkata metro was running normally.  Also, around 300 trains, including Shatabdis and Rajdhanis, have been hit across the North. Some passengers of Metro were said to be trapped inside bogies, with the automatic doors remaining shut.

By 1.30 pm on Tuesday, supply to Delhi was reduced to an all-time low of 40 MW against the city's demand of 4,000 MW. Around 2.20 pm, Union Power Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde had said that he expected the supply to resume within 90 minutes.

On Monday, nearly 270 million people across seven Indian states and Delhi experienced a blackout, which led to the cancellation of several trains.

As of now, it is said that Haryana, Punjab, Rajasthan and UP were drawing more power than provisioned for, which subsequently resulted in the grid failure.

On the outage and its resultant impact, Dr Alok Bharadwaj, president of the Manufacturer's Association of IT Industry, said, "These are kinds of setbacks that might render the industry severely handicapped. But we have to work together to conserve enough power; it's primarily due to strain on grids and we don't have enough power. Our leaders have to get together and work, so that national progress wouldn't be hampered."

Sterlite Technologies' Chief of Corporate Affairs, Satya N. Gupta, commented that there was no direct impact of the outage on the industry yet, but in the longer run, it would definitely impact the IT and telecom businesses. "Our networks are not geared up for such situations, but the exact impact can't be foretold."

As of now, said Rishi Raj Bhaskar, marketing manager, South Asia, Honeywell "businesses are running on back-up power supply. There is no significant impact on operations, but if this continues, there could be a crisis".