India's record power outage causes surprisingly little outage

Here and Now

Some 700 million Indians, more than half of that country's population and about 10 percent of the global population, was without power on Tuesday after a massive failure of three of the country's power grids.

For about 300 million people, it was the second day in a row of giant power failures, cutting people's access to clean water, public transportation and traffic lights.

According to The New York Times, it's the largest power outage in world history. But, for many Indians, the blackout elicited little reaction.

"In the first place, India’s grid is still being developed and does not reach into many homes. An estimated 300 million Indians have no routine access to electricity," the Times wrote. "Second, localized failures are routine. Diners do not even pause in conversation when the lights blink out in a restaurant."

Power outages are so common, in fact, that many businesses and individual already employ diesel generators to bridge temporary outages or, in this case, provide electricity as the government tries to determine what caused three grids, northern, eastern and northeastern, to collapse.

The BBC reported that Indian officials were blaming overuse by certain states for overwhelming the still-fragile grids and knocking them out.

India Power Cut Hits Millions, Among World's Worst Outages.
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