POWERLESS & CLUELESS Over Half Of India’s Population Reels Under World’s Biggest-Ever Blackout, Minister Gets Promotion North, East & North-East Grids All Trip

New Delhi: It was a Terrible Tuesday that 680 million Indians are not going to forget in a hurry. In the world's biggest blackout that affected onetenth of the global population, 21 states and Union Territories went on the blink after three arterial power lines collapsed at 1pm.      The northern, eastern and north-eastern regions suffered the outage when their  respective grids collapsed in quick succession with devastating effect.      The blackout disrupted normal life, rail and air services as well as industrial production across sectors.      Even as the country was reeling under the outage, power minister Sushil Kumar Shinde was moved out to the home ministry, and Veerappa Moily given the additional charge of power—a move that hardly indicated seriousness on the government's part in dealing with the crisis.      Some 300 miners were trapped in coal mines. Two hundred miners were evacuated from mines in Bengal. Till the time of reporting, efforts were on to rescue 65 others stuck in Jharkhand mines.      More than 300 trains were affected. Many others are likely to be cancelled. Airports, hospitals and BPOs functioned with their back-up generators. In Delhi, commuters again had a harrowing time, with the day being a scary one for those who were stuck in the Metro Rail trains that stopped in their tracks several feet above the street or deep inside tunnels. Roads were gridlocked as traffic lights stopped working.      In Kolkata, the Metro was not hit by the outage as the city largely remained isolated since power is supplied by a private firm. But West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee asked all government offices to shut early and urged the private sector and schools to do the same to protect against commuter chaos in the evening.      Tuesday's grid collapse, like Monday's, was triggered at Agra, a major interconnect between the northern, western and eastern grids.      On Monday, the Agra relay station had tripped to trigger a blackout. This time too, the station kicked off a domino effect after suspected overdrawal by some of the states in the eastern grid.  You can e-file I-T returns by Aug 31 D ue to the difficulties caused by the power failure, the I-T department has decided to extend the deadline for e-filing of returns to August 31. P 19 5 WAYS TO FIX THE MESS 1 Price power properly so that state utilities have money to buy power 2 Check theft and account for every unit of electricity produced. Cut out free power 3 Get regulators with teeth. Currently, most are ineffective retired IAS officers 4Invest in building new power plants, give them remunerative tariff, revamp existing plants 5 Plan for the future – for 10-20 years, not for 5 years TIMES VIEW Moving Sushilkumar Shinde out of the power ministry now is like changing the captain of the Titanic when it's reeling after hitting a giant iceberg. The country is in the midst of an unprecedented power crisis. For two days in a row, the grid has collapsed. This doesn't cover Shinde with any glory. Yet he's promoted as home minister. Even if that's ignored, what's pertinent at this point of time is that Shinde is likely to have some clue aboutthe power problem; a new minister – who will be holding additional charge of the portfolio – will possibly have none. So, what does the change indicate? The irrelevance of ministers? Never mind who's in charge, the net result is the same? PowerGrid hints at overdraw W ithin a fraction of a second of the Agra station tripping, the northern, eastern and the north-eastern grids went down. At the time, the three grids together were carrying some 66,000 MW, 12 times Delhi's demand. The tripping immediately shut down some 14,000 MW of generation capacity of state-run utility NTPC.      Who triggered the collapse? Fingers were pointed at Uttar Pradesh, Haryana and Punjab for overdrawing power. All three states stoutly denied the charge. PowerGrid chairman A M Nayak could not give a reason for Tuesday's grid collapse. "I am a technical person and it will be unfair on my part to suggest a reason without fully understanding and analysing the sequence of events that led to the problem," he said.      Nayak said the complex grid network and the increasing interconnectivity increase the vulnerability of the system. "It is difficult to point a finger at something quickly in a complex grid. Things happen in milliseconds. We have data from some 100 critical sub-stations. Only after a proper analysis will we be able to identify the reason."      Some 5,000 MW in the northern grid was restored by 4pm, or three hours after the outage. The grid was carrying 32,400 MW when it tripped. Similarly, 2,000 MW was restored in the eastern grid (12,000 MW) and 500 MW in the north-eastern grid (1,100 MW). The northern grid was carrying 22,000 mw, or 80% of its load by 7.30 pm. The eastern grid carried a load of 4,400 MW, or 40% of its usual load of 12,000 mw. The northeastern grid was operating at near-full capacity of 1,200 mw.      Nayak indirectly pointed that overdraw could be causing the collapse. "Some sections (of the grid, an indirect reference to states) are creating problem by overdrawing. The grid system is dynamic and not static. There are several parameters...voltage, frequency etc. These keep changing. Small over or under-drawal will be here and there. I can't say it will stop."      But Nayak's words did not cut much ice with UP, Punjab and Haryana, the states that had been blamed for tripping the northern grid by overdrawing power on Monday. All three denied the allegation. LIGHT AT END OF DARK HOLE: An RTO officer in Chandigarh keeps the files moving on Tuesday despite a blackout