[Federal officials
initially blamed the northern states of Haryana, Punjab and Uttar Pradesh for
taking from the grid far more than their electricity allotments. Part of the
reason may be that low rainfall totals have restricted the amount of power
delivered by hydroelectric dams,
which India relies on for much of its power needs. Another cause may be that
drought-stricken farmers are using more power than expected to run water pumps
to irrigate their crops.]
By Gardiner Harris And Jim Yardley
 |
| Image courtesy: Google |
NEW DELHI –
As electric power was restored across India on Wednesday,
the nation’s new power minister sought to tamp down a growing argument between
state and federal ministers over who was to blame for Tuesday’s unprecedented
blackout.
“I don’t think one can
have a blame game between the state and the center,” said Veerappa Moily, the
new power minister.
More than half of
India’s population lost electricity on Tuesday after a cascading series of
problems in three of the nation’s power grids shut down power 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. It trapped coal miners, stranded train
passengers and caused huge traffic jams in the nation’s capital.
Federal officials
initially blamed the northern states of Haryana, Punjab and Uttar Pradesh for
taking from the grid far more than their electricity allotments. Part of the
reason may be that low rainfall totals have restricted the amount of power
delivered by hydroelectric dams,
which India relies on for much of its power needs. Another cause may be that
drought-stricken 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 is supposed to
warn states if they are drawing excessive power from the system, and that did
not happen on Tuesday or Monday, when another blackout affected a quarter of
the nation’s population.
“This hype that states
are overdrawing is the reason for the collapse is not right,” said Ajit Sharan,
the power secretary for Haryana state. It is too early to say what exactly
happened, he said.
When the grid collapsed,
the frequency was 50.2 hertz, he said, which is normal. Had states been
overdrawing, the frequency would have dropped well below that level, he added.
Whatever the cause, the
scale of the blackout – the largest in human history – caused India acute
embarrassment on the international stage. Indians track world opinion of them
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 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,” he said.
Power experts in the
United States speculated that inattention by those manning crucial circuit
breakers on India’s electrical grid may have led to the blackout.
India’s basic power
problem is that the country’s rapid development has led demand to far outstrip
supply. That means power officials must manage the grid by shutting down power
to small sections of the country on a rotating basis. But doing so requires
quick action from government officials who are often loathe to shut off power
to important constituencies.
Mr. Moily promised that
he would ensure that the nation’s power grid had round-the-clock monitoring.
Some 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, which is 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 micro-hydropower plants are the answers
here,” Mr. Tshwant said.
Many of India’s major
corporations and industrial groups generate their own power and thus were
spared much of the disruption from the blackouts on Monday and Tuesday. Many
apartment and office buildings in India’s major cities have their own
generators as well. And as India’s power grid becomes ever more unreliable,
private power alternatives will further proliferate, despite their relative
inefficiency.
Tuesday’s blackout
affected a broad swath of India. 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, 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.
“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 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
had 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. Demand outpaced supply
by 10.2 percent in March, government statistics show.
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, with some power plants 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 harder 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 have reduced the capacity of hydroelectric power and forced
many farmers to turn to electric pumps to draw water from underground.
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, an official at
Eastern Coalfields Ltd., the mine’s operator. Most of the miners had been
rescued by late evening, news agencies said.
Ramachandra Guha, an
Indian historian, said the blackout was only the latest evidence of government
dysfunction. On Monday, he noted, 32 people died in a train fire in Tamil Nadu
State — 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.”
Reporting was contributed by Heather Timmons,
Sruthi Gottipati, Niharika Mandhana and Hari Kumar from New Delhi; Vikas Bajaj
from Mumbai, India; Raksha Kumar from Patna, India; Pamposh Raina from Gurgaon,
India; James Glanz from New York; and Matthew Wald from Washington.