July 31: Half the country plunged into darkness as the fragile distribution system for northern and eastern India collapsed this afternoon, disrupting normal life and leaving thousands of railway passengers stranded all over the country.

Bihar was among the 21 states affected by the grid collapse that brought life to a standstill at 1.02pm. The state’s drawal from the central sector came to a naught following the collapse of the eastern grid. The state draws around 1,275MW, including 248MW which the board purchases from the open market.

“It is the worst power crisis Bihar has ever faced. It is a total and catastrophic failure,” Bihar State Electricity Board (BSEB) chairman P.K. Rai told The Telegraph. Rai was himself monitoring the situation from state load dispatch centre.

The board began restoration of supply around 9pm. “We have started supplying 4MW to Patna and 10MW to the railways as essential services. Power will be restored gradually in parts of the state capital as and when the board gets supply from the generating units of NTPC,” said H.R. Pandey, board spokesperson.

But while the rest of the country, barring the south, reeled from the massive power outage, Bihar remained stoic. It was, for most residents of this power-starved state, just another day without electricity, of having to make do with their improvised power grid of backup diesel generators, of going about their daily business in the dark.

Chief minister Nitish Kumar told reporters after the cabinet meeting that the “Centre should develop a mechanism to deal with a situation where states cannot make overdrawal (of power)”.

Nitish, who said it was a disaster-like situation, appealed for calm. “Our officials are working to restore power supply. This time the board has nothing to do with the failure,” he said.

The blackout this afternoon arose because of the northern grid failure that resulted in the collapse of the eastern and northeastern grids.

While no single state has been identified as culprit, it appears that Sushil Kumar Shinde, power minister when the outage occurred but was later shifted to home, wrote yesterday to the Prime Minister, complaining that Uttar Pradesh has been habitually overdrawing huge amounts from the grid.

Today’s collapse was caused by several states overdrawing and not just Uttar Pradesh. States in the eastern region too overdrew. In a domino effect, the huge overdrawals from a system still recovering from yesterday’s outage saw not only the northern grid tripping but also the eastern and north-eastern grids collapsing, plunging cities and villages from Kashmir to Nagaland into darkness.

“Grid incident occurred at 1300 hours affecting the northern grid, eastern grid and north-eastern grid — system under restoration,” the national load despatch centre, under the power ministry, said in an update. Shinde told reporters “we are trying to identify the reasons for it. States are drawing more than the limit. I have asked for strict punishment for overdrawing power”.

“This morning only, I was told (by officials) that about 3,000MW extra power has been overdrawn from the eastern grid,” he added.

Uttar Pradesh has denied reports that the state is to blame. Officials, however, said Uttar Pradesh’s role is considered suspect because when Mayawati was in power, her government arranged additional power supply from Chhattisgarh, Gujarat and the western grid. The arrangement meant that the northern grid was not over-burdened.

However, the new Akhilesh Yadav government has organised no parallel power supply even though the state does not have sufficient power generation capacity, the officials in Delhi claimed.

But they added that no specific state could be blamed at this stage. “Data up to a milli-second has to be studied to know why the grid collapsed and was it due to excess withdrawal of power, if so by which state and by what,” an official said.

The basic premise for the stability of the grid is that load and generation must be balanced at all times to prevent a failure.

In spite of warning by the Central Electricity Regulatory Commission, states like Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh continue to draw excess power. The regulators cannot wield physical control over excess drawal of power, but can only impose financial penalty.