[Roughly
half of India ’s population lost electricity on Tuesday after a cascading
series of problems in three of the nation’s interrelated power grids shut down
power in an area stretching 2,000 miles, from Imphal in the east to Jaisalmer
in the west, and from Leh in the north to Bhubaneswar in the middle of the country.]
By Gardiner Harris And Vikas Bajaj
 |
Kevin Frayer/Associated Press
Cables and exposed wires splayed out of an electricity
substation in Power was restored across that affected about 670 million people |
The nation’s new power minister distanced himself from
assertions by his predecessor that state officials were responsible for Monday
and Tuesday’s blackouts by drawing more power for their regions than they were
allotted. But the former power minister, who was promoted in a cabinet
reshuffle, kept right on making those claims.
“I don’t think one can have a blame game between the state
and the center,” said the new minister, Veerappa Moily.
Hours later, Mr. Moily’s predecessor, Sushil Kumar Shinde,
again blasted the state governments. “The grid failed because of the
overloading of the power,” he said, contending that “many states” try to take
more power than scheduled.
Mr. Shinde was promoted to home minister on Tuesday.
Despite presiding over two of the biggest blackouts in human history, Mr.
Shinde declared himself to have been an “excellent” power minister.
Rather than focus on the loss of power, people should
appreciate that power was restored across India within a matter of hours, Mr. Shinde said.
His statements were mocked by a number of political
observers and became grist for severe criticism from opposition lawmakers.
Prakash Javadekar, a spokesman for the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party, said
that the government was merely trying to divert attention from its own
incompetence.
“The unprecedented grid failure is a result of negligence,
incompetence and complete abdication of duty on the part of the central
government,” Mr. Javadekar said.
Roughly half of India ’s population lost electricity on Tuesday after a cascading
series of problems in three of the nation’s interrelated power grids shut down
power in an area stretching 2,000 miles, from Imphal in the east to Jaisalmer
in the west, and from Leh in the north to Bhubaneswar in the middle of the country.
The blackout affected an area encompassing about 670
million people, or roughly 10 percent of the world’s population, though tens of
millions of those people were already living without access to a regular supply
of electricity. It temporarily trapped coal miners,
stranded train passengers and caused huge traffic jams in the nation’s capital.
There were no reports of deaths directly linked to the blackout.
Mr. Moily said Wednesday at a news conference that the
power supply was restored by 3 p.m. on
Tuesday for emergency services like railways and airports, and that by the
evening the power situation was “normal.”
“I can reassure the entire nation,” Mr. Moily said. “That
kind of situation will never repeat in the national scene.”
“The Indian power sector needs major reform,” said Rajendra
K. Pachauri, the director general of the Energy and Resources Institute in New Delhi .
Part of the reason that India ’s electrical grid is under particular stress at the moment
may be that low rainfall has restricted the amount of power delivered by hydroelectric dams, which India relies on for a significant share of its power needs. A
related cause may be that farmers are using more power than expected to run
water pumps to irrigate their crops.
But Ajit Sharan, the power secretary for Haryana, said that
the central government was supposed to warn states if they were drawing excessive
power from the system, but that no warnings were issued on Tuesday or Monday.
Whatever the ultimate cause turns out to be, the scale of
the blackout caused India acute embarrassment on the international stage. Indians
track world opinion closely, not only for reasons of national pride but because
foreign investments and remittances are crucial parts of the economy.
“The image of it looks very bad,” said Naresh Chandra, a
former ambassador to the United States and former electricity regulator in New Delhi . But Mr. Chandra said that the problems were fixable and
that international investors should not lose heart. “India is on a learning curve and hasn’t managed its technology
as it should. But it will.”
Some experts are more hopeful than in the past because a
number of Indian officials have made politically difficult decisions in recent
months to raise electricity prices. State governments in Tamil Nadu, West Bengal ,
Rajasthan and Punjab have moved to stem losses at public utilities that had
been selling power for far less than it costs them to buy it. Besides providing
more money to invest in additional supply, the higher prices for consumers and
businesses should also help lower demand for power.
“I think everybody has realized that there are no free lunches,”
said Chandan Roy, a former director at India ’s largest state-owned power producer, the National Thermal
Power Corporation.
Frequent blackouts have forced many businesses, including India ’s vaunted software industry, to rely extensively on diesel
generators, which typically cost two to three times as much to produce power as
does electricity from the grid. Comparisons are difficult, though, since the
government partly subsidizes both methods of generating electricity.
What is more, about 300 million people in India have no access to power at all, and 300 million more have
only sporadic access. Another of the nation’s basic problems is that supplies
of coal, largely controlled by the government, have not been enough to meet
demand even among power plants that have the capacity to generate more
electricity.
Shailendra Tshwant, an environmental activist and energy
consultant, said that relying on more coal and further centralizing the
nation’s energy infrastructure would be a mistake.
“Decentralized renewable energy sources like wind, solar
and microhydropower plants are the answers here,” Mr. Tshwant said.
If India ’s power grid becomes ever more unreliable, experts said,
private power alternatives will further proliferate, despite their relative
inefficiency.
And while the breakdowns may have been caused by a
technical fault, it is clear that they reflect India ’s larger problems with its power supply. “Though it looks
like an accident,” said Suresh Prabhu, who ran India ’s power ministry in the early 2000s, “it was an accident
that was waiting to happen.”
Gardiner Harris reported from New Delhi, and
Vikas Bajaj from Mumbai. Heather Timmons and Pamposh Raina contributed
reporting.
