Thoughts about blackouts in India

It seems that last blackouts in India have activated a lot of Business Continuity plans and have made the different between companies with and without a BC program. Lack of power supply is a clear continuity scenario to which most companies are prepared, mainly through power generators able to support the sites demand of electricity, or at least, of the most important.

Other issue to take into account is how to assure that workforces are going to reach their workplaces, since public transport are not available. Moreover, if telework is the alternative, How can they work from their homes if there is a lack of telecommunications?

ICTs are one of the resources that will be affected most because of their dependency on power supply. Blackout in India scenario shows resiliency examples of companies which principal business is IT services, as we can read on this article about Winpro, Genpact and WNS, but is not a trivial matter.

However my thoughts go in other way: Can this scenario be really included in the BC scopes?
In a first approach it seems clear that this scenario has to be included, but thinking on it deeply, our customers will probably be affected by the same problem, so it has no sense to be able to deliver our service if our customers are not going to receive it.
In a globalized world, in which we can have customer located near us or in the most remote place of the earth perhaps this thoughts has no sense, but we have to take into account that most business are done locally, with companies and organizations very close one to the others. Resource investments on this scenarios are not justified too much.
As an example, we can think on a clothing store: It’s difficult to have our store plenty of customers in a situation of a blackout like the one taken place in India. Every street and every shopping center are in dark

As a conclusion, and as an advise as well, when defining the scope of our Business Continuity plans we must evaluate the scenario thinking on the situation of our customers because perhaps I recover my services and there is nobody use it.