India's Blackout A Reminder Of How Far We've Come

Enlarge Channi Anand/AP A girl prepares a meal by candlelight in Jammu, India, during the massive blackout last week.

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August 4, 2012

This week, the world's largest democracy experienced the world's largest power outage. Nearly 700 million — that's more than half a billion — Indians were said to have been without power Tuesday. No air conditioning. No traffic lights. No metro system.
Most of the power is back now, but the outage had resonance for me from the long-ago years when I lived in New Delhi and experienced power failures almost as regularly as I did steaming cups of dark, sweet Indian tea.
Fifty years ago, most Indians had no electricity. Power belonged — politically and financially — to the rich. As the young wife of a modestly paid U.S. civil servant, I, most improbably, was rich in comparison to the bulk of the Indian population.


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