Gearing up for the Investors’ Summit slated in Dehradun on October 7-8, the Municipal Corporation of Dehradun (MCD) has plunged headlong into lighting a stretch of road from Maharana Pratap Chowk to Song river, installing optical poles and fitting LED lights. However, on the flip side of things, the citizens living in various municipal wards are continuing to complain about problems with the street lights remaining defunct. They say that the civic body pays no heed to their complaints which are piling up. Notably, the Prime Minister Narendra Modi is scheduled to inaugurate the investors’ summit.
However, with the much-hyped event approaching, the corporation claimed to have warned the agency tasked with managing the street lights of being blacklisted in case of its failure to repair the defunct ones.
An MCD official said, “We receive scores of complaints regarding street lights daily. But the problem is that things are not fully under our control. The agency which has been tasked to look after the street lights is not serious in the work. About 150 written complaints were registered in our office last month besides the online complaints. We try our best to repair the lights, but we know things are far from satisfactory on the ground.”
It is pertinent to mention that MCD had floated a tender for repairing and installing LED lights while replacing the sodium lights in 2017. A contract had been signed with Energy Efficient Service Limited (EESL) after which the company had started the work. However, after some time, it had stopped the work due to several problems it said it had faced.
Over the past one year, only 3000 sodium lights have been replaced while the target was replacing 42000 sodium lights. While things had remained in a shambles MCD had submitted a proposal to the State Government, seeking budget for setting up street lights for a particular stretch near the venue of the Investors’ Summit. Things were prompt as the approval was received in August and the work has been started by the public works department (PWD).
Quizzed over the civic body’s nonchalance to the common people’s complaints of defunct street lights as contrasted to its hyper-active mode to appropriately light a particular stretch of road, the officer in- charge said that the corporation is repairing as many street lights as possible. “We have also issued the fourth warning to the agency tasked with looking after street lights. The company will be blacklisted if they fail to do what they are mandated to do. We will then float fresh tenders for the task,” the officer added.