Blackout In India: 300 Million Without Power.

• U.S. blackout lasted weeks.
• India restored power within hours.
• No news reported about heat exhaustion fatalities.
• For being the second largest populated country in the world, an impressive recovery.

An excerpt from the news story,

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.

• Obama wants to shut down U.S. coal mines.

News report from CHICAGO TRIBUNE by Annie Banerji.