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Bystanders gather to look at a gutted train carriage, which caught fire from an electrical short circuit killing at least 32, in Nellore on July 30, 2012. At least 32 people were killed July 30 when a fire ripped through a coach on an express train as it carried sleeping passengers to the southern Indian city of Chennai, officials said. (AFP)
It was indeed ‘Black Monday’ for India on July 30 with 47 lives lost in a train fire and a massive power outage leaving 300 million without electricity in peak summer in the north of the country.
The power failure also left hundreds of thousands of train commuters stranded. The Delhi Metro was also affected.
A fire engulfed a passenger car on a moving train in the south of the country on Monday, killing at least 47 people, officials said.
Most of the passengers were asleep when the fire broke out at about 4 am. on the overnight train from New Delhi to Chennai, said local official B. Sridhar.
A train station worker noticed the burning coach on the train as it passed through the town of Nellore, nearly 500km south of Hyderabad, capital of Andhra Pradesh state, Sridhar said.
Once the alarm was raised, the train was stopped and the passenger car detached from the rest of the train to prevent the blaze from spreading. Passengers were evacuated once the train was halted.
"Since the fire had engulfed one door of the coach, people had to rush to the other end of the coach to exit," Sridhar told The Associated Press by telephone, speaking from the accident site.
He said the fire may have been caused by an electrical short circuit in the coach.
The blaze killed 47 people, said Anil Kumar, regional railway manager
At least 28 other passengers were hospitalised with burns, Sridhar said, adding that at least two of the injured were in critical condition.
Here are the helpline numbers:
Secunderabad: 040-27786723, 27700868; Vijayawada: 0866-2345863, 2345864 and Nellore: 0861-2331477, 2576924
Big power outage in north
The train fire tragedy was compounded by a major power outage that struck northern India, plunging cities into darkness and stranding hundreds of thousands of commuters on the region's trains. New Delhi and its metro service were also affected.
The chairman of the state-run Uttar Pradesh state Power Corporation Avinash Awasthi says it could take up to 12 hours to fully restore the electricity supply in eight northern states, including New Delhi, Punjab, Haryana and Rajashthan.
Awasthi said Monday's outage was the worst to hit the country in 11 years.
He said the power grid collapsed as some states apparently drew more power than they were authorised to do to meet the rising demand during the summer.
The power grid failure in Delhi and much of northern India left more than 300 million people without electricity on Monday.
The lights in Delhi and seven states went out about 2 am and had not been restored by the morning rush-hour, leaving the capital's workers sweltering overnight, then stranded at metro stations in the morning as trains were cancelled.
Blackouts are frequent in much of the country, including major cities. Chaos reigned on Delhi's always-hectic roads as stop lights failed.
"I'm 45 minutes late for work. First, no power since 2 in the morning, then no water to take a shower and now the metro is delayed by 13 minutes after being stuck in traffic for half an hour," said 32-year-old Keshav Shah, who works in a multinational software company 30 km outside the capital.
"As if I wasn't dreading Monday enough, this had to happen."
Authorities made restoring services to hospitals and transport systems a priority. By mid-morning electricity had returned to parts of Delhi and Uttar Pradesh. Rajasthan, Punjab and Jammu and Kashmir were also hit.
"We'll find out the reason and see that such kind of things are avoided in the future," Ram Nayak, the head of India's state-run Power Grid Corporation, said.
"The biggest priority is to connect essential loads back to public transport systems, whether it be the rail or the airport, hospitals and other places," he told TV network CNN-IBN.
Officials at Delhi's international airport said flights were unaffected.
India has a peak-hour power deficit of about 12 per cent. Delhi's private power company, BSES , said northern India last suffered such a major outage in 2001.
Delays in opening new power plants and coal mines, among other things, have held back capacity.
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