An off-duty flight attendant from KLM Royal Dutch Airlines browses a dark shop in Janpath Market, a popular tourist shopping area, during a power outage in New Delhi, July 31, 2012. /Getty
Updated at 3:00 p.m. Eastern.
NEW DELHI (CBS/AP) - Electric crematoria were snuffed out with bodies inside, New Delhi's Metro shut down and hundreds of coal miners were trapped underground after three Indian electric grids collapsed in a cascade Tuesday, cutting power to 620 million people in the world's biggest blackout.
While Indians were furious and embarrassed, many took the crisis in stride, inured by the constant - though far less widespread - outages triggered by the huge electricity deficit stymieing the development of this would-be Asian power.
Hospitals, factories and the airports switched automatically to their diesel generators during the hours-long cut across half of India. Many homes relied on backup systems powered by truck batteries. And hundreds of millions of India's poorest had no electricity to lose.
CBS News' Sanjay Jha reported that 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.
The outage in the eastern grid came just a day after India's northern power grid collapsed for several hours. (Click on the player at left for a full report).
"The blackout might have been huge, but it wasn't unbearably long," said Satish, the owner of a coffee and juice shop in central Delhi who uses only one name. "It was just as bad as any other five-hour power cut. We just used a generator while the light was out, and it was work as usual."
The crisis was the second record-breaking outage in two days. India's northern grid failed Monday, leaving 370 million people powerless for much of the day, in a collapse blamed on states that drew more than their allotment of power.
At 1:05 p.m. Tuesday, the northern grid collapsed again, energy officials said. This time, the eastern grid and the northeastern grid went with it.
In all, 20 of India's 28 states - with double the population of the United States - were hit in a region stretching from the border with Myanmar in the northeast to the Pakistani border about 3,000 kilometers (1,870 miles) away.
Hundreds of trains stalled across the country and traffic lights went out, causing widespread jams in New Delhi. West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee asked office workers to go home and rushed generators to coal mines to rescue trapped miners.
Sahiba Narang, 17, was taking the Metro home because school bus drivers were on strike, "but this power failure's messed up everything."
S.K. Jain said he was on his way to file his income tax return when the Metro closed. The 54-year-old held his head, distraught that he would almost certainly miss the deadline. Hours later, the government announced it was giving taxpayers an extra month to file because of the chaos.
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Streets are packed in heavy traffics following power outage and rains in the central part of New Delhi, India, Tuesday, July 31, 2012.
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AP Photo/Rajesh Kumar Singh
evening, power had been restored to New Delhi and the remote northeast, and much of the northern and eastern grids were back on line. Electricity officials said the system would not be back to 100 percent until Wednesday.
Power Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde said the new crisis had the same root as Monday's collapse.
"Everyone overdraws from the grid. Just this morning I held a meeting with power officials from the states and I gave directions that states that overdraw should be punished. We have given instructions that their power supply could be cut," he said.
But others were skeptical of Shinde's explanation, saying that if overdrawing power from the grid caused this kind of collapse, it would happen all the time.
"I just can't believe that there is no system in place to check whether the states are drawing more than their limit or not," said Samiran Chakraborty, head of research at Standard Chartered, a financial services company. "There has to be a much more technical answer to that question."
At a contentious news conference, R.N. Nayak, chairman of Power Grid Corp., which runs the nation's power system, said his staff was searching for the cause of the problem and pleaded for patience.
"We have been running this grid for decades. ... Please trust us," he said.
The blackouts came amid consumer anger with the recent increase in power fees, including a 26 percent hike in Delhi, that government officials said were needed to pay for the steep rise in fuel costs.
The Confederation of Indian Industry said the two outages cost business hundreds of millions of dollars, though they did not affect the financial center of Mumbai and the global outsourcing powerhouses of Bangalore and Hyderabad in the south. Like many, the group demanded a widespread reform of India's power sector, which has been unable to keep up with the soaring demand for electricity as the economy expanded and Indians grew more affluent and energy hungry.
"India has outgrown its own infrastructure," said Jagannadham Thunuguntla, a strategist at SMC Global Securities.
An Indian man prepares a meal as others sit at a roadside shop on a dark street following a power outage near a railway station in Allahabad, India, Tuesday, July 31, 2012.
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AP Photo/S.K.Yadav
India's Central Electricity Authority reported power deficits of more than 8 percent in recent months, and many economists said the power deficit is dragging down India's economy.
"Without power we cannot run an economy at 8 percent, 9 percent growth or whatever your ambition is," Chakraborty said.
Part of the problem is that India relies on coal for more than half its power generation and the coal supply is controlled by a near state monopoly that is widely considered a shambles.
Well, I guess I'm just going by how you guys have only two parties and there is so much hatred between the two. So much bickering back and forth. And very obsessive about politics. It enters into everything. We have 5 parties in Canada, and we don't see that kind of bickering or hatred. We don't even discuss politics with each other.
Well, it's not just about politics that this country seems to have so much hatred about. We seem to have a country that has produced alot of angry, hateful people in the last 5 years. Some have ALWAYS been hateful and angry, others graduated to it through the economics of late. People who have been able to pay for what they want get pretty pi*ssed if they can't even pay for what they need. The world is suffering right now, but the Angry American is quite loud in voicing their unhappiness with their individual situation....and that usually boils down to blaming someone for their lot in life. The politicians are our target because it is all of their fault that we have all lost so much. The politicians know this so they pit class against class...aka class warfare. It keeps us from staying focused on the fact that the politicians are the ones that caused the problems, whether by listening to the different lobbies or by not listening to their constituents or by just being plain old greedy little pric*ks. No matter how you slice it, Americans are just sick of the bullsh***t....problem is, how do we fix it??? Beats me...it's "us" against "them" it seems and "us" just keeps getting glued and screwed to the wall.
More vehicles come off the assembly lines as white. Lots of people want white...easy to clean, doesn't absorb heat as much as darker colored cars...lots of fleet vehicles are white, just the most neutral color in the world evidently.
Only a Republican with intellect on par with Palin would try and associate this event with Obama. Please don't further the stereotype that Republican's are poorly educated morons.
Oh please Robin, your comment could apply to either party. Neither party seems to be able to keep their foot out of their mouths, but I must admit, Romney is leading in this are at this moment. Can't wait for ole Mitt to get his butt back to the US before he diverts his comments to the problem in India. Can you just see the idiotic comments that would come out of his mouth about this situation? Something like "India's personnel in charge of their electric distribution problem could take lessons from America about how to handle an outage...why the electricity was only out for a week back East in our country......oh, wait, never mind".
It came already....remember back in the East when the electric was out recently due to a really bad storm that took out the electricity of a WHOLE BUNCH of people and it took almost a week to get it restored????....maybe not as many as in India, but then our whole country only equals about half of the people in India whose electricity doesn't work. Still....the US has already been there.
It is corporate you are talking about....easy answer...these "lazy people from India who do not do their job will not be paid each day they to not do their job even though they can not do their job, that is not our problem"...NO WORK, NO PAY, that's the corporate way.
That actually was only a "black out" at night so that enemy aircraft could not see the towns in the dark..the electricity was usable during the daylight hours. Kinda different from NO electricity day OR night.
"When companies like General Motors went global, they told the American people that by their example they would be the best human and workers' rights ambassadors, raising standards across the global economy," the institute said. "It is time for General Motors to act.""
Granted, GM did act but not in favor of the workers... people are free to look up the latest chapters in that incident and then claim "it can't happen here", note the quote... Sinclair Lewis - a fascinating chap, he was...
If they are so in the dark, how the heck did they acquire nukes and how are they able to take care of them. I think some of that country is still living in the dark ages, but good grief, I sure hope their silo regions are not (or where ever they store their toys)!!
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evening, power had been restored to New Delhi and the remote northeast, and much of the northern and eastern grids were back on line. Electricity officials said the system would not be back to 100 percent until Wednesday.
erasmus111-
More is not necessarily better!
Well, I guess I'm just going by how you guys have only two parties and there is so much hatred between the two. So much bickering back and forth. And very obsessive about politics. It enters into everything. We have 5 parties in Canada, and we don't see that kind of bickering or hatred. We don't even discuss politics with each other.
http://skirsch.wordpress.com/
India is building one and they will be doing thorium conversion as well. India has a large supply of thorium in the ground, but not much uranium.
I can think of only one other bigger blackout - maybe World War II.
Ironic, isn't it?
http://peacemoonbeam.typepad.com/bighairynews/2012/07/worlds-largest-toaster-attempt-fails.html
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/04/13/general-motors-ceo-urged-to-address-indian-workers-complaints/
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"When companies like General Motors went global, they told the American people that by their example they would be the best human and workers' rights ambassadors, raising standards across the global economy," the institute said. "It is time for General Motors to act.""
Granted, GM did act but not in favor of the workers... people are free to look up the latest chapters in that incident and then claim "it can't happen here", note the quote... Sinclair Lewis - a fascinating chap, he was...