Monday, January 5, 2015: India is not far behind the trend of having massive LED installations around the world as the Bombay Municipal Corporation (BMC) has decided to replace the old street lights of Mumbai with fresh LED lights in a drive to reduce the costs and save energy consumption. Union minister Piyush Goyal has asked the civic body to implement this scheme with immediate effect and the responsibility of undertaking this project has been given to Energy Efficiency Services Ltd (EESL), an organisation run by the central government.
According to reports, the BMC spends as much as Rs 164 crore towards the maintenance of these street lights. 20 crore units of electricity are spent on the city’s street lights. But once they are replaced with the energy efficient LED lights, the units consumed is expected to go down by almost half and hence the overall costs incurred by the civic body will also go down heavily. Besides things getting cheaper, the BMC will also save a lot of money as only 40 per cent of the savings will have to be paid to the company in the next six months. Besides, the maintenance of these LED lamps for the next seven years will be done by the company as well.