A Rare Compliment .......

India shining (in the dark)

SIR – I understand your concerns about what the recent power cut in India tells us about the country’s energy infrastructure (“Blackout nation”, August 4th). Yet India’s response was remarkable. The power cut affected 680m people, more than double the entire population of the United States, but energy was restored to 80% of those people within half a day.

Electricity is the most fragile and least protected of all infrastructures in all countries around the world. A technician’s error in America’s Midwest shut down the entire electricity grid along the eastern seaboard in 2003, for example. John McCreary, an intelligence analyst, once said that every complex system will fail, but the speed of recovery is the best measure of a healthy system.

Bernabé Gutiérrez C.
Valencia

( from the Letters to the Editor, the Economist)