NEW DELHI – A massive power failure hit India for the second day running Tuesday as three regional power grids collapsed, blacking out more than half the country in a crisis affecting over 600 million people. Hundreds of miners were trapped underground in the eastern state of West Bengal when the lifts failed, metro services were stopped in the capital, hundreds of trains were held up nationwide and traffic lights went out causing widespread traffic jams. Electric crematoria stopped operating, some with bodies half burnt. ATMs were not functioning, and banks had to turn back customers because the system was down. Hospitals and airports, accustomed to the regular outages caused by load-shedding, said they had switched to generators and back-up systems to keep their operations running normally. “The north, northeastern and the eastern grids are down but we are working and we will have them restored shortly,” Naresh Kumar, a spokesman at the Powergrid Corporation of India Ltd, said. Federal Power Minister Sushilkumar Shinde told reporters that the monster outage, which struck around 1:00 P.M. (0730 GMT) in the middle of the working day, was caused by states drawing power “beyond their permissible limits.” There appeared to have been a domino effect, with the northern grid drawing too heavily on the eastern grid which in turn led the northeastern grid to collapse. “Half the country is without power. It's a situation totally without precedent,” said Vivek Pandit, an energy expert at the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry. – Agencies
