The Eastern and North-Eastern grids collapsed this morning. The Eastern grid caters to West Bengal, Bihar, Jharkhand, Orissa and Sikkim, while the North-Eastern grid caters to Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Tripura, Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland and Mizoram.
The failure comes on a day the Northern Grid collapsed for the second consecutive day. According to sources, restoration of normal grid supplies in the East and North-East should take 12-14 hours.
Kolkata and the twin city of Howrah are relatively unaffected as CESC systems have survived the failure. Sources suggest CESC officials are now helping the State grid's revival efforts.
While the problems are yet to be assessed, the state power department officials said except for one unit in Bakreshwar, all the other units had collapsed. Failure of the Eastern grid has led to a blackout in several fringe areas of Kolkata.
Train services on the Eastern Railway and South-Eastern Railway routes were affected. Railway authorities suggest at least 200 trains were stranded in the Eastern region.
According to an Eastern Railway spokespeson, 23 local trains and 16 mail/ express trains have been stranded. These include two Rajdhani Express trains.
Metro Rail services in Kolkata have been kept normal, officials said. The Kolkata airport (Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose International Airport) too was not affected by the situation.
According to the West Bengal Power Minister, Mr Manish Gupta, at around 1 pm the Western and Eastern grids collapsed leading to massive cuts in the Eastern and North-Eastern States of the region.
"We are rationing the power supply system in the State. We are trying to restore power back into the grids. It might take a longer to restore power supply for running trains along different routes.,” he said.
In Kolkata, the IT sector has remained largely unaffected so far. Power to Sector V in the salt Lake area is supplied by the State power utilities. IT sector employees, however, wondered, how long the sector will remain unaffected if the situation fails to improve soon.