The world’s second most populous country has had more than half of its territory left in darkness after a massive failure by three of its major power grids, one failing for the second time in as many days.

India, which holds over 17% of the world’s people, has been brought to a standstill, with over 600 million affected by the outages. This has led to the train service being brought to a halt, as well as hospitals being forced to rely on backup generators to keep patients alive. Reports have also come in from eastern India, where 200 miners are trapped underground. They have been moved to a ventilated area in the meanwhile until power is restored. Over 350 Metro trains have been halted.

Areas affected include Delhi, Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh and Rajasthan in the north, and West Bengal, Bihar, Orissa and Jharkhand in the east.

India’s power minister has blamed the outages on some states possibly pulling too much power. Whilst power outages in India are commonplace, mostly due to an increase in demand stressing of an aging grid, a failure of this magnitude has not been seen since 2001.

[Source: BBC]