NEW DELHI—India suffered the world's most massive power outage on Tuesday as transmission networks serving areas inhabited by 680 million collapsed, putting the nation's ramshackle infrastructure on stark display.
The grid failure, the second massive blackout in as many days, happened around 1 p.m. local time and affected 18 states and two union territories in north and eastern India, grinding trains across large swaths of the country to a halt, forcing thousands of hospitals and factories to operate on generators, temporarily stranding hundreds of coal miners underground and causing losses to businesses estimated in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
The government said power was about 80% restored in north India by late Tuesday evening.
Access to electricity is far from universal in India, and Indians are accustomed to regular power outages in particular neighborhoods or sections of cities. Many businesses and farmers see backup diesel-run generators as an absolute necessity. Still, Tuesday's massive breakdown was unprecedented, impacting a population larger than the U.S., Brazil and Russia combined.
For a nation that sees itself as an emerging global power, the event was a huge embarrassment. It put on vivid display, for Indians and the world, how rickety the country's basic infrastructure is. And it could further tarnish the perception of India among foreign companies who have long viewed the country's outdated roads, ports and power networks as major drawbacks of doing business here.
The power outage wreaked havoc on businesses and travelers. About 200 trains stopped operating for several hours. Metro rail services in the national capital of New Delhi and its suburbs were halted. About 270 miners were stuck in two underground coal mines in eastern India as elevators stopped working. All had been rescued by late Tuesday.
At the Nigambodh Ghat, a New Delhi crematorium, three dead bodies were cremated using wood after the power failure, an official at the crematorium said. In India, Hindus generally try to cremate bodies the same day a person dies if the death occurs before dusk, and furnaces generally run on electricity.
The All-India Institute of Medical Sciences, one of Delhi's main state-run hospitals, ran its diesel generators for almost two hours.
A tea plantation in the foothills of the Himalayas, Kailashpur Tea Estate, said it had to give its generators a rest every few hours, stalling production. And since the generators don't supply power to street lights on the estate, which is surrounded by forests, the power outages raised some specific concerns. "Leopards and elephants often wander into the plantation," said senior manager Manas Bhattacharya. "About three months ago, two female workers were mauled by a leopard on the estate. Wild elephants are everyday visitors."
In the western city of Jaipur, Swati Jain, co-founder of the Happy Store, which sells handicrafts there, said there was no electricity between 11 a.m. and around 4 p.m. It was "awfully bad," said Ms. Jain, adding that even during peak summer hours, locals are used to only two-hour power cuts at most.
The tiny Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, which borders India, came to its much larger neighbor's aid this week, releasing additional power from its hydroelectric plants while India worked to restore its networks to full capacity.
The government Tuesday even extended the deadline for filing of income-tax returns by a month to Aug. 31, citing "reports of disturbance of general life caused due to failure of power," among other reasons.
The blackout on Tuesday was the largest known blackout in history in terms of the population affected, according to an estimate by the Associated Press. The second-worst was India's outage Monday, which affected a population of 370 million followed by a 2005 outage in Indonesia which left almost 100 million in the dark, the AP said..........
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