New Delhi: Life came to a grinding halt in entire northern states on Monday following breakdown in electricity supply caused by failure of the northern grid.
The grid collapsed at about 2.30am forcing people to spend a sleepless night.
The power outage had a cascading effect as many areas in Delhi either did not get the water supply or the taps ran dry in no time.
While flight operations remained unaffected since Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport is equipped with adequate power back up system, road and rail commuters faced a harrowing time in reaching their destinations.
Even services of the Metro rail remained suspended in the morning creating problems for office-goers in reporting for work in the morning.
“As if spending a sleepless night wasn’t enough, I couldn’t take bath and realised Metro was not operational, so rushed back home to pick up my car and got stuck in a massive traffic jam. I was late by an hour in reporting to my office today,” said Kishore Sinha, a Noida-based software professional who travels by Metro to reach his Gurgaon office.
With Metro services remaining suspended during the rush morning hours, Delhi which has the highest vehicular population compared to any other city in India, suddenly saw presence of a huge number of vehicles on its roads. With traffic signals not working and policemen conspicuous by their absence to man road crossings, massive traffic jams were reported from most parts of Delhi and its satellite townships in neighbouring Haryana and Uttar Pradesh.
“My son uses the Metro to go to Delhi University. Since it was not working, he requested me if I could drop him to his college. We started in our car around 8am and got stuck in a massive traffic jam. We could reach home after couple of hours while my son had to miss his classes today,” said Nindini Nagpal, a Gurgaon-based homemaker.
Rail commuters also had to face problems as many trains were either cancelled or were running several hours behind schedule.
The VIP areas also were affected by the power failure. The Prime Minister’s House went without power for nearly two hours before supply was resumed in a phased manner upon restoration on priority basis. The priority as explained by the power minister Sushil Kumar Shinde was to supply power to infrastructure sectors, VIP areas, hospitals and the Metro.
Offices and educational institutions reported thin attendance initially in the morning.
Although power outage is a regular feature, particularly during summer months when demand soars up, the failed monsoon has created further problems this year as a huge gap between demand and supply is being witnessed in several northern states, especially in Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh as farmers are using electricity to irrigate their fields.
The life had crawled back to normal by the afternoon, though many Delhi-ites feel they may face water problem even today (Tuesday) as water plants remained shut for most of the day.
