One of the most popular online hiring sites, oDesk, showed the interesting data regarding the correlation between the work hours and blackout in India.
oDesk provides a simple and easy environment where you can hire software developers, web designers, virtual assistants, or any other contractors. This way you can easily outsource the jobs you do not know, or do not want to do.
Many contractors on oDesk are from India and nationwide blackouts can have a big impact on work hours on oDesk.
They compared the work hours during the month before the blackout and at the day of the blackout.
The difference was surprisingly not that big, so it seems the blackout was not severe as it was reported by the media.
Another interesting observation was that Indian contractors tend to take weekends off, comparing to contractors from other countries.
See the full story with graphs here https://www.odesk.com/blog/2012/08/the-blackouts-in-india-and-odesk-impact/ and here http://onlinelabor.blogspot.com/2012/07/the-indian-blackouts-odesk.html
There is also a lot of interesting work data on oDesk Country explorer https://www.odesk.com/blog/2012/07/visualizations-of-odesk-oconomy/.