Scene at a metro station in Delhi. How prepared is India to face such disruptions? (Image credit The Hindu)

India, the so called economic powerhouse, for the last two days has been suffering from sweating heat after successive major power grid failures.

As reported by HT, over 300 million people in Northern and Eastern Indiahave been affected by this outage as both the power girds collapsed on Tuesday afternoon.

The power failure has affected many states in the region including West Bengal, Jharkhand, Bihar, Orissa,Jammu, Himachal Pradesh, Punjab, Haryana, Uttarakhand, Rajasthan and capital city ofDelhi.

All the services has come to a stand still including railway network, metro trains, hospitals. According to reports, more than 100 trains are stranded on the tracks from the northern town ofGhaziabadto Mughal Sarai, a major railway junction in easternIndia.

Hospitals are also running out of backup power supply to cope up with emergency services.

However, Indira Gandhi International Airport is running smoothly owing to its strong power backup system installed recently after the upgradation of airport terminal.

All the Metro services have been shut down and people are asked to vacate the stations leading to a complete chaos.

In a statement, Sushil Kumar Shinde, the Indian power minister, said that it may take upto six hours to restore the power supplies.

The problems started on Monday night at 2:33 am when the entire northern grid collapsed leading to a power cut of mire than 15 hours including capital Delhi.

Some circles have even started spreading rumours that it is an act of terrorism. In the social media, people are also talking about the possibility of govt hand it to divert people’s attention from ongoing protests of Anna Hazare against corruption.

Claiming to be a major economic player of the future, India needs a lot of homework to do before even dreaming to be called so. With a population of more than 1.25 billion people major chunk of which lives under miserable conditions, the country has to do a lot on the infrastructure front. Beside large population,Indiais plagued by corruption, red tapism, poor infrastructure and terrorism are some of the problems that prevent foreign investors to enter the country despite it being a huge market.

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