‘Beautification’ to cost civic body Rs 1.7L/month in power bills alone

Hyderabad: Faced with the prospect of shelling out around Rs 1.70 lakh a month towards electricity bills for “beautification” drive involving wrapping streetlights of city with LED light strips measuring hundreds of metres, GHMC officials, who had come up with the idea of light strips in the first place, are now said to be mulling about limiting the LED lights to festival periods.

A total of 948 streetlight poles in Khairatabad and Secunderabad zones of Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation have been decorated with white LED light strips. A senior official at GHMC headquarters said the decision to beautify streetlight poles was taken by respective zonal offices of the corporation. GHMC, as an entity, was not privy to this decision-making process. “The zonal offices have been given the powers to take up beautification works and the head office has no say in this matter,” the official disclosed.

With the cost of LED strips for each pole estimated between Rs 3,000 and Rs 4,000 – depending on the length of the strip that averages to 13 metres — the two GHMC zones are estimated to have spent anywhere between `28 lakh and `38 lakh just on the cost of LED strips.

While officials maintain that LED lighting has been a hit with people with requests coming in for installing them in more areas of the city, their installation is not without risks, according to Professor K. M. Lakshman Rao, who heads the civil engineering department at Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University.

“These LEDs are adding to the intensity of lighting on the streets, which is not a good thing. While each streetlight is of about 120 watts capacity, the LEDs are taking this to anywhere between 300 and 400 watts,” he said. “It not just costs more in terms of power bills for GHMC, such additional lighting is not safe for road users, who might be distracted by it, or find themselves unable to adjust to the increased intensity of lighting, especially when they are hit by bright headlamps of vehicles coming from the opposite direction. Usually, people require one or two seconds of reaction time to avoid an accident,” the professor pointed out.

“The spatial dimensions of being on a road lit in this manner differ from person to person. Frankly, I am worried about the safety aspect of this additional lighting,” he stated.

Lakshman Rao also said that the current LED streetlights, as well as the LED strips around the poles, are much more “cooler” in terms of their light emission. “Ideally, streetlights should be of a ‘warmer’ tone, something that is emitted by the likes of sodium vapour lamps of the past,” he maintained.