India’s industrial sector suffered huge losses on Tuesday, as many factories had to stop production while others shifted to emergency generators as a massive power outage hit the country’s northern, eastern and northeastern regions.
“Losses to business have been in thousands of crores of rupees, which pales into insignificance compared to the difficulty that the people of the country have had to face,” the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) said.
On Tuesday’s blackout was even more wide-reaching and severe than the power failure that plunged several states in northern India into darkness yesterday.
R V Kanoria, president of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, said failure of the power grid had had an impact on all sectors of the economy, including the industry, which would have to bear considerable losses due to production stoppage.
The chamber said recurrence of grid failures would send out a very negative image of India at a time when investor sentiments were low.
Other industry bodies in the northern and eastern parts of the country maintained the losses due to the grid failure were massive.
Ranjit Mehta, who heads the energy committee of the PHD Chamber of Commerce, said if the industry did not work for a day, it would affect the large number of daily wage workers as well. According to D L Sharma, vice-chairman of the CII Punjab State Council, many small scale hubs in northern India, which do not have dedicated power back up systems, have been badly affected.
Nirmal Baradia, a Jaipur-based exporter of gems and jewellery, said the power outage would certainly cast a negative impact on the gems and jewellery trade of the city because the units in the trade were power-based.
The power failure was a shocker to most of the industries in Uttarakhand, which has 7,000 manufacturing units. Some of the officials in the manufacturing plants of these companies said the production was badly affected on Tuesday. "Yesterday, the power was disrupted when it was night, but on Tuesday, the power went off in the afternoon when the factories were working in full steam,” said an official of Tata Motors Ltd.
