I live in Delhi and during peek summer time (April to June) 3-4 hour power cuts are routine, sometimes due to load shedding and sometimes due to faults. But that's not the horrible part since we have battery backup (known as Inverters) that can provide power for 6-8 hours. The horrible part is that during nighttime the voltage goes as low as 160 volts and the frequency drops too, as a result most critical cooling devices like fridges and ACs don't function at all. As more and more people in a locality install voltage regulators or stabilizers, they draw large currents and trip the transformers, sometimes dozens of times in an hour.

I've also spent several years in tier two cities, where 8-10 hour power cuts are part of normal life and smaller towns where a failure can cause week-long power cut. I know with surety that large parts of the National Capital Region (NCR) have massive power cuts. Housing societies and businesses run large diesel generators charging 3-4x the normal rate and causing immense pollution.

This is only half the story, the story of low power supply. Then there is power theft. I don't have exact figures but when I used to go to the billing office for paying our meager bill of a few hundred rupees, I saw pending bills of hundred of thousands rupees. People hadn't paid their bills for decades. Occasionally there would be raids and the defaulters' power would be disconnected, then they would hook up to the power lines illegally for some time and then get the connections back under some amnesty scheme.

It remains to be seen where the power to 'electrify' all households come from and who'll actually foot the bill for the 'free' connections and the lifetime free electricity.