The day the power went off in Delhi and northern India, I was at home in Bangalore, a city that fortunately escaped the blackout. It brought back memories of my student days in Kolkata, a city then (in the 1980s) notorious for its power cuts. Eight or 10 hours without electricity were de rigueur. The fan would stop working at night: at 38C and 90 per cent humidity, this meant no sleep until the power came back. We would gather outside, talking in groups, varying our routine by walking to the highway that ran alongside our campus, where dhabas served tea (and stronger stuff) all night.
Even now, many villages have electricity for only four to six hours a day and some still have no power at all. As a student, I awoke when the fan went off. On the other hand, peasants wake themselves up when the lights come back, to use the tubewells that irrigate their fields.
Indians have long been used to erratic power supply; yet the recent outages were special, spectacular in their scale and impact. Twenty one out of 28 states were without power for long stretches. Some 600m Indians were affected. It is not yet clear what caused the collapse. With the monsoon having failed, it is far hotter and drier than is usual at this time of year, driving the rich to use more air conditioning and peasants to rely more heavily on their tubewells. In the rush to satisfy their citizens, individual states drew more than their share from the National Grid. As The Hindu newspaper reported, Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Rajasthan, Haryana and Uttarakhand all “ignored strong warnings from the . . . Central Electricity Regulatory Commission to maintain grid discipline and stop over-drawal”.