Half of India without power after grid failure

India was hit by a second day of major blackouts on Tuesday after grids in a dozen states went down, leaving around half of the country’s 1.2 billion population without power.

Stretching from Assam, near China, to the Himalayas and the deserts of Rajasthan, the power cut was the worst to hit India in more than a decade.

Trains were stranded in Kolkata and Delhi and office buildings switched to diesel generators and traffic jammed the roads, with the lights out even at major hospitals in Kolkata.

“We’ll have to wait for an hour or hour and a half, but till then we’re trying to restore metro, railway and other essential services,” Power Minister Sushilkumar Shinde told reporters.

Shinde blamed the system collapse on some states drawing more than their share of electricity from the overstretched grid. Asia’s third-largest economy suffers a peak-hour power deficit of about 10 percent, dragging on economic growth.

“This is the second day that something like this has happened. I’ve given instructions that whoever overdraws power will be punished.”

The problem has been made worse by weak a monsoon in agricultural states such as wheat-belt Punjab and Uttar Pradesh in the Ganges plains, which has a larger population than Brazil. With less rain to irrigate crops, more farmers resort to electric pumps to draw water from wells.

High consumption of heavily subsidized diesel by farmers and businesses has fuelled a gaping fiscal deficit that the government has vowed to tackle to restore confidence in the economy. But the poor monsoon means a subsidy cut is politically difficult.