The northern grid crashed early on Monday in one of the worst outages in more than a decade, plunging eight States into darkness, affecting inter-State train operations and health services and impacting millions of lives. The 400-kV Bina-Gwalior line, feeding the Agra-Bareilly transmission section, tripped at 2.35 a.m. and wreaked havoc on the generation and transmission systems, shutting down all major plants, including hydropower stations, in Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan, Delhi, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir and the Union Territory of Chandigarh, all wired to the northern grid. The immediate impact was shortage of around 32,000 MW.