India: Half of the Country without Electricity, Miners Trapped Underground

"The networks in the north, northeast and east are down but we are working to quickly restore them," he told AFP Naresh Kumar, a spokesman for the national grid, Powergrid Corporation of India.

Hundreds of miners are trapped in a coal mine in eastern India after the blackout, told reporters the prime minister of the State of West Bengal.

"We are trying to rescue the miners. We do everything to bring back electricity. We need power to operate elevators in underground mines," said Mamata Banerjee, stating that "hundreds" miners were trapped.

The federal Minister of Energy, Sushilkumar Shinde, provided that this failure was extremely rare magnitude due to "States that have exceeded their authorized supply capacity on their network."

About 400 trains across the rail network were affected.

A total of 19 out of 28 states were affected, and the federal capital New Delhi, according to a calculation by AFP.

In New Delhi, the subway was stopped and the lights cut off.

"The drivers were ordered to stop in the subway stations. No passengers will be allowed to enter the station until power is restored," he told AFP a spokesman for the Metro the Indian capital.

Much of West Bengal (east) and Calcutta, the capital of that State, were also victims of the collapse of the power grid, told AFP B. Mukherjee, an official in the local power, West Bengal State Electricity Supply.

"This is the most serious energy crisis in the region. We were trying to provide electricity to the grid north and this supply has led to the collapse of ours," he told AFP the Minister of Energy from the local government of West Bengal, Manish Gupta.

The same process seems to have led to the collapse of the network's northeast.

Monday, northern India, home to 300 million, was plunged into chaos after a power giant, the worst in India for eleven years.

The entire power grid in the north collapsed shortly after 2:00 in the night between Sunday and Monday (8:30 p.m. GMT Sunday) and could not be fully restored at the end of the day.

This failure has disrupted traffic for about 300 trains throughout the region, the subway in New Delhi and blocked the traffic lights in major cities, causing countless traffic jams in the morning rush hour.

The federal Minister of Energy, Mr. Shinde, however, recalled Monday that such a blackout was not the prerogative of developing countries, citing the 2003 United States which could not be resolved that after "four days".

In India, an emerging country in search of new energy supplies to fuel its growth, power outages are extremely common but they are usually short-lived.

India, which depends mainly on coal, seeks to portray the nuclear share in electricity production from 3% currently to 25% by 2050.