The Deeper Truth: ‘Many people caught in the middle of the world’s biggest power outage experienced it as a brief flicker of the lights. And many others didn’t experience it at all. Though the headlines announced that seven hundred million people across twenty-one states had lost power, only about three hundred and twenty million of those had any electricity to begin with: in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state and one of its poorest, sixty-three per cent of households, or about a hundred and twenty-five million people, lack access to electricity. Nationwide, about one third of households (roughly four hundred million people, more than everyone in the United States) don’t have electricity—which sounds like an astonishing number, until you consider that twenty years ago fifty-eight per cent of households were without electric power.’
What Was Revealed When the Lights Went Out in India The New Yorker.pdf