This is done typically in India, just before elections, to make sure the voters forget their inefficiency and incompetency while choosing their leaders.
A significant percentage of the population doesn't have electricity. I doubt that a free-phone will make them forget that for very long. I suppose those people would also have to be given some sort of solar charger?
Although much has be said about incompetence and insufficient infrastructure related to the recent wide-scale power outages, A few things suggest that many have jumped to conclusions. Here's another possible explanation:
1) They routinely have shorter outages from a practice called "load shedding" (what the U.S. called "rotating outage blocks"), so high demand along with insufficient generating capacity should not cause a grid failure. The frequent outages seen by many are of this non-failure variety.
2) The first outage wasn't at a time of peak demand, being around 2 AM.
3) The outages occurred during a minor geomagnetic storm and the arrival of a CME (coronal mass ejection) that followed a flare event. Storms sometimes may trip protective circuits without major components failing.
4) The last wide-scale outage there was on January 2nd, 2001, also during solar events seen of the previous solar maximum.