Southern India Protests Leave 21 Million People Without Power

October 10, 2013 Leave a comment

Southern India Protests Leave 21 Million People Without Power

Almost 21 million people were left without electricity for the third consecutive day in Andhra Pradesh as protests against a plan to split the southern Indian state spread, halting power plants and impeding distribution. No electricity has been supplied since Oct. 6 to the districts of Prakasam, Nellore, Cuddapah, Ananthapur, Krishna and Guntur, a top official in the state government’s electricity department said. Almost 3,600 megawatts of generation capacity, or 20 percent of the state’s total, remain shut as 60,000 workers stayed away from work, he said, requesting anonymity as he isn’t an authorized spokesman.A three-hour daily power cut has been imposed in Hyderabad, the state capital where Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) and Google Inc. have offices, while train services and hospitals have been affected, he said. Water supplies are likely to be hampered unless the situation improves in the next two days.

“The situation is being monitored at the highest level,” said V. Sekhar, executive director at Power Grid Corp. of India Ltd., which runs the southern grid. “Every care is being taken to ensure there’s no threat to the grid.”

Failure to contain the protests may prompt further distribution cuts to sustain a power grid that connects all of southern India. Talks with the labor unions of state power plants are on to prevent a repeat of last year’s collapse of the northern power grid that left an area inhabited by almost half of India’s 1.2 billion people without electricity.

Stones at Police

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s cabinet last week approved the proposal to create the Telangana state, India’s 29th, sparking agitations in the other half of Andhra Pradesh. Television images yesterday showed mobs pelting stones at the police, bus tires being set on fire and rows of damaged buses.

“In the worst case, there’s an option to isolate Andhra Pradesh from the southern grid,” said Debasish Mishra, head of energy practice at Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu India Pvt. in Mumbai. “Because of the blackouts, the load has already gone down significantly and as long as they are able to match the demand and supply, the grid should be fine.”

The lack of personnel has resulted in Andhra Pradesh cutting its electricity distribution by half, state Chief Minister N. Kiran Kumar Reddy told CNN-IBN television news channel yesterday. A. Satya Rao, press secretary to Reddy, didn’t answer two calls made to his mobile phone.

The control of Hyderabad, which falls in the proposed state of Telangana, is one of the main reasons behind the protests, Reddy said.

A 50-year-old campaign for statehood for Telangana got new life in December 2009 when Singh’s government backed the idea as a local leader’s hunger strike triggered protests that closed roads and offices. The government made little effort to finalize the plan as demonstrators for and against the new state clashed on the streets.

India created three new states — Jharkhand, Uttarakhand and Chhattisgarh — in 2000. The country has 28 provinces and seven union territories that are administered by the central government.

To contact the reporters on this story: Rajesh Kumar Singh in New Delhi at rsingh133@bloomberg.net

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