RailEnquiry

Over Half Of India’s Population Reels Under World’s Biggest-Ever Blackout, Minister Gets Promotion
Sanjay Dutta TNN

North, East & Northeast Grids All Trip
New Delhi: It was a Terrible Tuesday that 684 million Indians are not going to forget in a hurry. In the world’s biggest blackout that affected one-tenth 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 northeastern regions suffered the outage when their respective grids collapsed in quick succession with devastating effect. The blackout disrupted life, rail and air services as well as industrial production across sectors.
    Even as the country was reeling under the outage, power minister Sushilkumar 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 while another 65 were rescued from Dhanbad in Jharkhand. The miners had gone in for the first shift and got stuck when the grid collapsed. More than 300 trains were affected. Many others may be cancelled.
I-T e-filing date extended till Aug
    The government on Tuesday extended the deadline for e-filing income tax returns till August 31 after power failure disrupted normal life in several parts of the country. This has been done for assessees liable to file income tax returns by July 31, a CBDT official said. 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 4 Invest 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 about the 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?


LIGHT AT END OF DARK HOLE: An RTO officer in Chandigarh keeps the files moving on Tuesday despite a blackout