More than 700 million people in India have been left without power in the world's worst blackout of recent times, leading to fears that protests and even riots could follow if the country's electricity supply continues to fail to meet growing demand.
Twenty of India's 28 states were hit by power cuts, along with the capital, New Delhi, when three of the country's five electricity grids failed at lunchtime.
As engineers struggled for hours to fix the problem, hundreds of trains failed, leaving passengers stranded along thousands of miles of track from Kashmir in the north to Nagaland on the eastern border with Burma.
Traffic lights went out, causing jams in New Delhi, Kolkata and other cities. Surgical operations were cancelled across the country, with nurses at one hospital just outside Delhi having to operate life-saving equipment manually when back-up generators failed.
Elsewhere, electric crematoriums stopped operating, some with bodies left half burnt before wood was brought in to stoke the furnaces.
As Delhiites sweated in 89% humidity and drivers honked their horns even more impatiently than usual, in West Bengal the power cut left hundreds of miners trapped underground for hours when their lifts broke down. All the state's government workers were sent home after the chief minister announced it would take 10 to 12 hours for the power to return.
First to fail was India's northern grid, which had also collapsed the previous day leaving an estimated 350 million people in the dark for up to 14 hours. It was quickly followed by the eastern grid, which includes Kolkata, then the north-eastern grid.
An estimated 710 million people live in the affected area, ever more of whom require electricity as they snap up the air-conditioning units, flat-screen TVs and other gadgets that have become status symbols among India's burgeoning middle class.
India has five electricity grids – northern, eastern, north-eastern, southern and western. All are interconnected, except the southern grid. The northern grid covers nine regions: Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan, Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, and Chandigarh.
At least six states are covered by the eastern grid: West Bengal, Chattisgarh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Orissa and Sikkim; the north-eastern grid connects Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Assam, Meghalaya, Manipur, Mizoram and Tripura.
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