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.