Traffic on a dark road near Patna Women’s College. Picture by Ashok Sinha

Tired of walking on dark streets after sunset, residents of the state capital want lights. But the civic body is ill-equipped to fulfil their wish.

The streets plunge into darkness after sunset, thanks to hundreds of defunct lamps. Forget the smart, LED street lamps fitted with auto-timers that the Patna Municipal Corporation (PMC) had promised the residents. They feel lucky to see even the conventional lamps on the busy stretches these days.

First, street lamps in many areas of the city went awry and, sometimes, even remained switched on 24x7 for weeks. Now, the major streets remain dark, as lamps are not turned on even after dusk.

Most of the busy roads in the capital like Boring Road, Boring Canal Road, Bailey Road, SP Verma Road and Golghar Road remain plunged in darkness as the street lamps have not been working for several weeks.

“It becomes extremely difficult to manoeuvre through the dark roads. Drivers are forced to use their headlights after sunset. It is shameful that the government cannot take care of the street lamps even in the busiest areas of the capital,” said Akash Anand, a private bank executive.

Tarun Kumar, a resident of Boring Road area, too, spoke on similar lines. “Dark roads are especially unsafe for women, who fear treading out after sunset. It helps goons and chain-snatchers and scares commuters. Chances of accidents increase manifold because of the defunct lamps,” he said.

To make matters worse for residents, most of the 50 street lamps installed in each of the 72 wards of the corporation a few months ago under the councillor development scheme are yet to function. PMC, the government agency responsible for maintaining streetlights, admitted that it was unable to ensure proper upkeep of the lamps because of lack of funds, resources and manpower.

Sheshank Shekhar Sinha, the executive officer of the New Capital circle — the PMC zone that includes the central and busiest part of the city — said maintaining the street lamps was a costly affair and the PMC was unable to do so.

“The maintenance work was given to a private agency. However, the contract expired a few months ago and at present nobody looks after the lamps,” he said.

Most of the lamps are old and their filaments often get snapped. “Repairing a fused street lamp costs about Rs 2,000. We know that a large number of street lamps are not working. But we neither have the funds nor the means like lifts or trained technicians to repair them. We are therefore handicapped in the matter till the work is outsourced to some private firm again,” Sinha added.

Ironically, the civic body does not even have centralised data on the exact number of street lamps and high-mast lights in all the four administrative circles of the city.

Officials, in hushed tones, admitted that the work of operating and maintaining the lamps were assigned to the corporation though it did not have the necessary infrastructure, or manpower, to do the work.

PMC additional commissioner (planning and development) Chandrama Singh pledged to hire an agency by this month-end to look after street lamps.

“We have floated tenders to invite some private agency for maintaining the street lamps in a public private partnership mode. Its pre-bid meeting was to be held around a fortnight back but that could not be convened as the chief engineer was transferred. We hope that things will be finalised by the last week of July,” said Singh.