Yes, the power is so unstable there that many businesses have back up plans of sorts but is still very disruptive according to this news link.

Work making potato chip display racks at Jayraj Kumar's factory barely paused when much of India's power grid collapsed.
The backup generators kicked in automatically and the electric saws, presses and welding machines kept running, just like they do during the five-hour power cuts the factory in suburban Delhi suffers nearly every day.
India's unreliable power system has forced businesses to create a workaround electricity system of noisy, dirty diesel generators that prepared them well when the world's worst blackout hit the country Tuesday.
But the trouble has also vastly increased businesses's expenses, dragged down their productivity and hampered economic growth in the country.
"Running a factory is very tough here," Kumar said.

It seems that one of the problems is that farmers have been using a lot of juice for irrigation due to lower than normal rain fall.

Interestingly, an article I read suggested as much as 10% of the energy distributed by the Indian electrical grid is unaccounted for (read stolen).

Many parts of India have multihour power losses every day just to keep the rest of the grid up. Most people and businesses have adapted pretty well.

One thing I read in a technical forum from an Indian power engineer suggested that the big outage was likely caused because the grid controllers failed to shut off power to certain places as they were supposed to as demand rose to an unsustainable level. Probably due to being bribed by some large user(s) to leave it on.

I doubt that the recent Indian power failure resulted in much loss of life.
Power cuts are very frequent indeed, daily in some areas, therefore any person or facility that relies on electricity to preserve life would have been prepared.

This event made world wide headlines because such a large area was affected at the same time.
However in say a hospital operating theatre, a power cut is a power cut, and it matters not if the whole nation, or just a small area is affected. A reliable backup supply is needed in either case.