• Massive India blackout leaves 300 million without power

    Rajesh Kumar Singh / AP

    Passengers sit in a train and wait for power to be restored at a railway station in New Delhi on Monday.

    By NBC News and wire services

    NEW DELHI - Grid failure left more than 300 million people without power in New Delhi and much of northern India for hours on Monday in the worst blackout for more than a decade, highlighting chronic infrastructure woes holding back Asia's third-largest economy.

    The lights in Delhi and seven states went out in the early hours, leaving the capital's workers sweltering overnight and then stranded at metro stations in the morning rush hour as trains were canceled.

    Electricity supplies were restored to Delhi and much of Uttar Pradesh, a state with more people than Brazil, by midday (1:30 a.m. ET). But the states of Rajasthan, Punjab and Jammu and Kashmir were still without full power in the early evening.

    Power Minister Sushilkumar Shinde said all power would be restored within hours.

    Power shortages and a creaky road and rail network have weighed heavily on the country's efforts to industrialize. Grappling with the slowest economic growth in nine years, Delhi recently scaled back a target to pump $1 trillion into infrastructure over the next five years.

    Inconsistent supply
    Major industries have dedicated power plants or large diesel generators and are shielded from outages -- but the inconsistent supply affects investment and disrupts small businesses. Office blocks, hotels and large apartment buildings all use backup diesel generators.

    Chaos reigned on Delhi's always-hectic roads on Monday as stop lights failed and thousands of commuters abandoned the metro. Water pumping stations ran dry.

    "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 20 miles outside the capital.

    "As if I wasn't dreading Monday enough, this had to happen," Shah added.

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    The government's top economic planning adviser, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, said the blackout may have been caused by a mix of coal shortages and other problems on the grid.

    "I've no doubt that this is the area that we need to show improved performance in, and we also need show a clear sense of what we are doing to prevent it," Ahluwalia told Reuters at his office, where power had been restored some hours earlier.

    All thermal plants under the northern grid had failed, sources told The Times of India.

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    "Delhi is also getting emergency hydel power from Bhutan on a priority basis along with power from the PM's residence and AIIMS," which is the acronym for the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, the newspaper quoted an unnamed source as saying.

    Weak monsoon
    He said the grid was better networked now than five years ago and power sharing was more common.

    But blackouts lasting up to eight hours a day are frequent in much of the country and have sparked angry protests on the industrial fringes of Delhi this summer, the hottest in years.

    More coverage of South and Central Asia on NBCNews.com

    At least 200 trains were canceled with some stranded. Authorities made restoring services to hospitals and transport systems a priority.

    Shinde blamed the outage on an incident near Agra, the home of the Taj Mahal, without giving details. He said repairs were being carried out fast compared to a similar grid outage in the United States four years ago.

    "In 2008, there was a power failure in the USA. Their Federal Energy Regulatory Commission asked India for assistance and it took four days to restore the power," he told reporters.

    India suffers a peak hour power deficit of about 10 percent. It has been made worse this year by a weak monsoon, driving demand from farmers pumping more water from wells.

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    The outage forced the shutdown of a nuclear power plant at Rawatbhata in the desert state of Rajasthan. It will take about 48 hours to restart. Hydroelectric plants in the Himalayas and thermal power stations in the wheat belt of Punjab and Haryana were slowly returning to normal.

    Rising demand
    India has the world's fifth-largest coal reserves and relies on it for two-thirds of its power generation. Wrangles over land and environmental clearances and failure to invest in new mines and technology have held back coal output as demand rises.

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    Officials at Delhi's international airport said flights were unaffected. Delhi's private power company, BSES, said northern India last not suffered such a major outage since 2001.

    "This kind of breakdown shows that the system needs some big overhaul to increase credibility and increase the confidence in the system of India," said Jagannadhan Thunuguntla, equity head at Delhi-based brokerage SMC Capital.

    "More homework needs to be done," Thunuguntla said.

    Reuters contributed to this report.

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  • Be happy, not just rich, says UN chief Ban Ki-moon

    Stan Honda / AFP - Getty Images

    Bhutan's Prime Minister Jigme Thinley (left) and Laura Chinchilla, Costa Rica's presdent, during a United Nations panel discussion Monday on "happiness and well-being."

    By Ian Johnston, msnbc.com

    The world needs a new economic model based around “gross global happiness” rather than simply making money, according to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

    Ban, speaking at a meeting organized by the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan called “Happiness and Well-being: Defining a New Economic Paradigm”, said social and environmental factors should be considered, a statement posted on a United Nations website said.

    “Gross National Product has long been the yardstick by which economies and politicians have been measured. Yet it fails to take into account the social and environmental costs of so-called progress,” Ban told at the meeting at U.N. headquarters in New York Monday.

    “We need a new economic paradigm that recognizes the parity between the three pillars of sustainable development. Social, economic and environmental well-being are indivisible. Together they define gross global happiness,” he added.

    Bhutan introduced the idea of “Gross National Happiness” in the early 1970s and in 2011 the U.N. General Assembly adopted a resolution noting that using a purely financial indicator “does not adequately reflect the happiness and well-being of people in a country.”

    May 7, 2009: Government policies and programs will be judged by the happiness they produce in the tiny mountain kingdom of Bhutan.

    Ban noted that other countries have become interested in the idea, such as the United Kingdom, where authorities are experimenting with measuring “national well-being,” the statement said.

    The President of the General Assembly, Nassir Abdulaziz Al-Nasser, added that “today’s unprecedented ecological, economic and social challenges have made the achievement of happiness and well-being an unachievable goal for many.”

    “It is imperative that we build a new, creative guiding vision for sustainability and our future -- one that will bring a more inclusive, equitable and balanced approach that will promote sustainability, eradicate poverty and enhance well-being and happiness,” Al-Nasser said, according to the statement.

    With a royal wedding, television in Bhutan comes of age

    In December last year, in a speech to India’s parliament, Bhutan’s Prime Minister Jigmi Thinley outlined his country’s ideas.

    According to an edited version of his speech posted online, Thinley said the world today was “deeply troubled.”

    “Somewhere, along the way, we lost our nobler sense and let our greed take over to engender an obsession for creation of wealth at any cost,” he said in the speech. “Economists or powers behind market forces and their flawed theories fuelled this obsession.”

    According to the CIA Factbook, the first democratic elections in Bhutan were held in 2008. Some 47 percent of the population are literate and its GDP per person is $6,000.

    Its economy is "one of the world's smallest and least developed," the Factbook says. "The industrial sector is technologically backward, with most production of the cottage industry type," it adds.

    The first radio station was launched in 1973 as a private company but is now owned by the state. The first TV station, also state-owned, was allowed by the government in 1999.

    It introduction prompted concern about children copying WWE wrestling moves, pornography, the loss of Bhutanese culture and a rise in crime, according to BBC News.