Calcutta has 1.26 lakh lamp posts with 2.32 lakh lamps on 1,700-plus roads. The civic body spends Rs 30 crore of taxpayers’ money every year to pay the power bill.

Over 1,250 employees make up the civic lighting department, responsible for maintaining the lights. Yet darkness descends on major stretches after sunset.

In response to a Metro campaign on non-functioning street lights (see grab on right), the Calcutta Municipal Corporation (CMC) had promised to designate lamp posts with numbers, install automatic timers so that the lights were switched on and off at proper time and conduct a survey to assess the lighting needs on roads vis-a-vis the illumination available.

Two years later, Metro checks whether the promises have been kept:

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Lamp post numbers

Objective: To make it easier for a Calcuttan to lodge a specific complaint about a non-functioning lamp post or one where the lights glow during the day; to allow the CMC lamp posts to be differentiated from the ones maintained by the public works department, Calcutta Port Trust and the Calcutta Metropolitan Development Authority; and for Geographical Information System mapping.

Who is responsible: The civic lighting department, which has over 80 employees in each of the 141 city wards.

Reality: Less than 100 lamp posts in central Calcutta have been numbered. No one knows when the process of numbering will start again.

“We can’t restart the numbering in monsoon because the employees are busy with maintaining the power lines in drainage pumping stations. We might outsource the work after monsoon,” said Pradip Jyoti Biswas, the chief engineer (lighting).

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Automatic timers

Objective: To save electricity, ensure illumination of streets after dark and dispense with the need to maintain a vast workforce to operate streetlamps.

Who is responsible: The civic lighting department.

Reality: The timer has been installed in hardly 35,000 lamp posts. In over 28,000 of them, the gadgets do not work, according to an official in the department. “The timers are locally made and are of poor quality,” he added.

The civic employees who are responsible for operating over 70 per cent of the lights often don’t do so on time. Hence, streets remain dark at night and the lamps continue to blaze during the day.

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Illumination need

Objective: To find out whether the roads are optimally illuminated.

Who is responsible: Bengal Engineering and Science University (Besu) was asked to carry out the survey last year for Rs 17 lakh. The project was part of the Calcutta Development Plan being prepared by the university.

Reality: The survey report is not ready. S.K. Roy, the principal consultant of Besu for the project, said: “We will submit the report in two months. Several changes have to be made in the lighting system.”

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Mayor says: “The Besu report will be filed in two months. It will incorporate the illumination status in different areas. We have started discussions with companies like Philips and Bajaj regarding automatic timers. I welcome complaints from residents of areas where lights do not work or are not switched off during the day.”