India power outage plunges 300 million into sweltering darkness

(CBS/AP) NEW DELHI - The power grid across northern India failed Monday, halting hundreds of trains and leaving millions of people sweating in the heat in one of the worst blackouts in a decade, highlighting the country's inability to feed a growing hunger for energy.

New Delhi's prestigious Metro was among rail services that went down and hospitals shifted to generator power when the country's northern grid crashed about 2:30 a.m. because it could no longer keep up with the huge demand for power in the hot summer. Residents woken from sleep when their fans and air conditioners stopped, came out of their homes in New Delhi's sweltering heat as the entire city turned dark.

By late morning, 60 percent of the power had been restored in the eight northern states affected by the outage, Power Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde said. He said he expected the rest to be back to normal by late afternoon, adding that he was forming a committee to investigate the outage.

CBS News' Sanjay Jha reports that at the peak of the outage, an estimated 300 million people across India's densely populated north were in the dark, and without power for air conditioners and fans. Delhi's ever-congested roads turned to complete gridlock in places Monday morning as traffic lights went dark. Police tried to man some of the busier intersections in the sprawling city.

Shinde announced that the government was setting up a three-member panel to look into the failure of northern power grid.

It was the first time since 2001 that the northern grid had collapsed. But India's demand for electricity has soared since then as its economy has grown sharply, and the outage was a reminder of the country's long road ahead in upgrading its infrastructure to meet its aspirations of being an economic superpower.

In addition, a weak monsoon has kept temperatures higher this year, further increasing electricity usage as people seek to cool off. Shivpal Singh Yadav, the power minister in the state of Uttar Pradesh, home to 200 million people, said that while demand during peak hours hits 11,000 megawatts, the state can only provide 9,000 megawatts.

The grid collapsed because some states apparently drew more power than they were authorized to take to meet the summer demand, Uttar Pradesh Power Corporation chief Avnish Awasthi said.

Blackouts are a frequent occurrence in many Indian cities because of a shortage of power and an antiquated electricity grid. At the same time, tens of millions of people living in villages in northern India have no access to the electricity grid at all.

Earlier this month, angry crowds blocked traffic and clashed with police after blackouts in the Delhi suburb of Gurgaon that houses many high-rise apartment blocks and offices. With no power in some neighborhoods for more than 24 hours, people erected blockades that paralyzed traffic for several hours.

Transmission and distribution losses in some states are as much as 50 percent because of theft and connivance of employees in the power industry.

Source: http://feeds.cbsnews.com/~r/CBSNewsTheEarlyShowBoxOffice/~3/rwU1dUx7IX4/

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