Flash floods in mountainous northern Indian have killed at least 34 people and left hundreds of Hindu pilgrims stranded, officials said Sunday.

Twenty-three workers at a hydroelectric power plant in Uttarakhand state died after water gushed into the facility on Saturday, state disaster management minister Yashpal Arya said.

Federal anti-terror agents joined local police in the western Indian city of Pune on Thursday to probe a series of low-intensity blasts the night before when the new home minister had been due to visit.

The four explosives went off in succession beginning shortly after 7:30 pm (14:00 GMT) on Wednesday, targeting a bustling restaurant and shopping area in the town in central Maharashtra state and injuring one person.

Indian police have charged a journalist with conspiring to carry out a bomb attack on an Israeli diplomat in New Delhi in February, a senior police official told Agence France Presse Wednesday.

Syed Kazmi, a freelance journalist who worked part-time with Iran's IRNA news agency, is accused of helping a group of Iranians to plan and execute the attack which saw a man on a motorbike attach a magnetic bomb to an Israeli embassy car.

India restored its power supplies on Wednesday after two days of massive outages that blacked out half the country, but fears remained that the grid could again collapse under the strain of over-demand.

India's electricity network was back at full capacity after three regional grids failed on Tuesday in the country's worst power crisis that left more than 600 million people without supplies.

India's northern and eastern power grids collapsed on Tuesday, blacking out half the country and affecting hundreds of millions of people in the second day of electricity chaos.

"We are busy with the revival right now... Both the Northern and Eastern grids have collapsed. Please allow us to address the problem," V.K. Agrawal, the general manager of the northern grid, told Agence France Presse.

A massive power cut blacked out a vast swathe of northern India Monday, leaving an estimated 300 million people without power in the worst outage in more than a decade, officials said.

Power Minister Sushilkumar Shinde said the entire northern grid collapsed for six hours shortly after 2:00 am (2030 GMT Sunday), causing chaos in nine states including the capital New Delhi.

At least 32 people were killed Monday when a fire ripped through a coach on a speeding express train as it carried sleeping passengers to the southern Indian city of Chennai, officials said.

The accident, on a long-distance service from New Delhi, occurred in the early hours of the morning near the town of Nellore in Andhra Pradesh state.

Indian activist Anna Hazare, who galvanised the country last year with his hunger strikes against corruption, began a new fast Sunday to press demands for a crackdown on official graft.

Hazare and his supporters want parliament to strengthen a pending anti-corruption bill and the creation of a special team to probe possible graft allegations against 15 ministers, including Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

The death toll from ethnic unrest in India's northeast rose to 50 on Saturday while at least 400,000 languished in relief camps as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh visited the conflict-hit area.

The national government has dispatched medical teams to Assam to tend to the victims of the fighting that erupted eight days ago between indigenous Bodo tribes and Muslim settlers over long-running land disputes.

A top Indian minister has proposed projects worth $130 million project to rid India of the scourge of open defecation and clean up a rail system he described as the world's "largest open toilet", reports said Friday.

Rural Development Minister Jairam Ramesh told a meeting in New Delhi on Thursday that India, where 130 million households are without a latrine, accounted for 60 percent of the global volume of open defecation.