After illuminating Harish Mukherjee Road, S N Banerjee Road, New Park Street and Syed Amir Ali Avenue, LED lights will now adorn more important thoroughfares across the city. Emboldened by the pilot LED project’s success on four streets, the first ever initiative in an Indian metro, Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) has roped in Asian Development Bank (ADB) to foot major part of the Rs 500 million bill.
According to a Times of India report, ADB has agreed to part-fund KMC’s LED project in the first leg of phase II of the Kolkata Environment Improvement Project (KEIP). The decision was taken at a meeting between KMC brass and a three-member ADB delegation. The visiting senior ADB officials from Manila agreed to fund part of the project cost.
From February, work on installing LED lights will begin in Bidhan Sarani, Vivekananda Road, Amherst Street, Loudon Street, Camac Street, Bondel Road, Ballygunge Circular Road, Gurusaday Road and Alipore Road, among other streets. Work is expected to complete by July, said a KMC lighting department official. “Initially, we have decided to install 15,000 LED lights. It will cost us Rs 50 crore. Since we wanted to install environment friendly lights, we opted for LED,” said municipal commissioner Arnab Roy.
