Índia às escuras: o maior 'apagão' da História
Sweeping outages in India have left approximately 670 million people there without power. There are more Indians who have no lights, air conditioning, or refrigeration (save those powered by private generators); whose streets have no traffic lights, subways, or street lamps; than there are people living in all the U.S., Canada, Mexico, and Japan put together. It appears to be the single largest power outage in the modern history of electricity. The second largest was yesterday's outage in northern India, which has since spread. The third largest left 100 million Indonesian without power in 2005. For comparison, the largest blackout in American history, in 2003, effected 45 million people. Indian officials say they have still not deduced the source of the problem.
On a regular day, during peak hours, India's grid can only meet about 90 percent of the electricity demand. Meanwhile, the Indian government is also struggling to deal with a major drought. The convergence of these two calamities is a reminder of how far India still has to go before it can duplicate the sort of modernization and rise from poverty that China and other East Asia countries have achieved. Below, the story of over a half-billion people without power, told in photos.
Traffic is gridlocked across urban New Delhi, a city of 14 million. With the public train system shut down and the city's already raucous traffic made even more dangerous and impassible by the lack of power lights, the city has been described as "in chaos." No one is yet sure what the disruption to these northern cities will mean for India's already faltering economy. (AP)
Girls study educational Islamic texts at a madrasa in Noida, on the outskirts of New Delhi, India's capital. (Reuters)
Stranded passengers wander rails at the New Delhi station after hours of inactivity. Some Indian media has noted that the blackout has forced members of New Delhi's middle and upper classes to experience life as the far more numerous lower class does on a daily basis. The sprawling poor neighborhoods of India's rapidly growing cities endure regular, if typically briefer, outages in power and public services. (AP)
A girl looks through the windows of one of the many trains stalled along India's enormous rail system, a legacy of British imperial rule. (Reuters)
A police officer in the city of Chandigarh reads documents with the help of a flashlight. Basic government services, which in some areas in still modernizing, have been hit hard by the outages. (Reuters)
A barber in Calcutta cuts a customer's hair by candlelight. With the blackout now in its second day, many Indians are trying to push ahead with daily life. (AP)
A New Delhi shopkeeper fiddles with a generator outside of his storefront. India's economy, the ninth largest in the world, has been growing rapidly in large part as its enormous rural population moves into cities. This means that the Indian economy is fueled largely by its cities, and because those cities run on electricity, today's loss is both a symbolic and actual blow to the country's effort to lifts its hundreds of millions of impoverished citizens above the poverty line. (AP)
Commuters line up at a New Delhi metro station, perhaps a bit optimistically. (AP)
Indian soldiers guard the entrance to a closed metro station. So far, neither looting nor other crimes appear to have been much a problem, though they have been endemic in other blackouts. Some Americans may recall the disintegration of order in New York City during the 1977 blackout there (thankfully, the looting was not repeated in the 2003 U.S. blackout).
A young Indian boy watches from a window of a stalled train as he waits for the train to resume its services following a power outage at a railway station in New Delhi, India, Tuesday, July 31, 2012. India's energy crisis cascaded over half the country Tuesday when three of its regional grids collapsed, leaving 620 million people without government-supplied electricity for several hours in, by far, the world's biggest blackout. Hundreds of trains stalled across the country and traffic lights went out, causing widespread traffic jams in New Delhi. (Kevin Frayer/AP)
Indian pedestrians walk on a street under electric wires in the old quarters New Delhi on July 31,2012. (Sajjad Hussain/AFP)
Commuters wait for buses outside a Metro station after Delhi Metro rail services were disrupted following power outage in New Delhi, India, Tuesday, July 31, 2012. The outage came just a day after India's northern power grid collapsed for several hours leaving cities and villages across eight states powerless. (Rajesh Kumar Singh/AP)
A traffic jam following power outage and rains at the Delhi-Gurgaon road on the outskirts of New Delhi, India, Tuesday, July 31, 2012. India's energy crisis cascaded over half the country Tuesday when three of its regional grids collapsed, leaving 620 million people without government-supplied electricity in one of the world's biggest-ever blackouts. (AP)
A traffic jam following power outage and rains at the Delhi-Gurgaon road on the outskirts of New Delhi, India, Tuesday, July 31, 2012. India's energy crisis cascaded over half the country Tuesday when three of its regional grids collapsed, leaving 620 million people without government-supplied electricity in one of the world's biggest-ever blackouts. (Roberto Schmidt/AFP)
Portable power generators provide electrical power to souvenir shops along Janpath Market, a popular tourist shopping area, during a power outtage in New Delhi on July 31, 2012. India's northern and eastern power grids collapsed on July 31, blacking out half the country and affecting hundreds of millions of people in the second day of electricity chaos. (Tengku Bahar/AFP)
An Indian barber holding a candle, has a haircut for a customer at his shop in Kolkata, India, Tuesday, July 31, 2012. (Bikas Das/AP)
Indian stranded passengers wait for the train services to resume at a railway station following a power outage in New Delhi, India, Tuesday, July 31, 2012. Hundreds of trains stalled across the country and traffic lights went out, causing widespread traffic jams in New Delhi. (Rajesh Kumar Singh/AP)
Indian stranded passengers wait on a platform and some of them on rail tracks for the train services to resume following a power outage at Sealdah station in Kolkata, India, Tuesday, July 31, 2012.(Bikas Das/AP)
A stranded Indian train passenger rests inside a railway coach as he waits for the train service to resume following a power outage in Kolkata, India, Tuesday, July 31, 2012. India's energy crisis cascaded over half the country Tuesday when three of its regional grids collapsed, leaving 620 million people without government-supplied electricity for several hours in, by far, the world's biggest-ever blackout. (Bikas Das/AP)
