Street lights in several parts of Salt Lake have stopped functioning and in places where they still working, overgrown canopies of trees cast shadows on the roads, making it risky for motorists.
Several residents said driving through some of these roads was treacherous because they were dotted with potholes.
“Anyone driving through these places has to depend completely on the headlights. Nearly all street lights have stopped working on the road leading to my house,” said Sutirtha Bhowmick, a resident of IA Block in Salt Lake’s Sector III.
Recently, The Telegraph travelled across the township and found several roads devoid of working street lights.
Many stretches of the Broadway that cut across Salt Lake and lead to EM Bypass did not have working street lights.
A 500m-long stretch of the road from the GD Island to the FE Block Island does not
have a single working street light.
The Canalside Road (along the Eastern Drainage Canal), another road that connects EM Bypass with Salt Lake, has only a few working street lights.
Motorists who drive towards Salt Lake from the Bypass through the concrete road beside the Jal Vayu Vihar housing complex, close to the Chingrighata crossing, encounter several dark stretches like the area around Mahavir Vikas Housing Complex and the Kendriya Vidyalaya No. 2 Salt Lake, opposite Nicco Park. Such dark patches continue till the JK Saha bridge near EE Block.
In Sector I, large stretches of the road along the Kestopur canal are completely dark at night.
“We have sent several letters to the Bidhannagar Municipal Corporation but no action has been taken,” said Tapas Sengupta, the secretary of the AE Block Samaj Kalyan Sangha, the residents’ body of the block.
The Bidhannagar Municipal Corporation is responsible for maintaining the lighting systems and the lamp posts. The power supply lines are maintained by the West Bengal State Electricity Distribution Company Limited (WBSEDCL), which supplies power.
A senior WBSEDCL official said all their supply lines to street lights were fine and that they had conducted a check recently after being told that many of the lights were malfunctioning.
Krishna Chakraborty, the mayor of Bidhannagar, said repairs of street lights “are carried out periodically and civic teams regularly keep checking them”.
“We have already sanctioned 20 new street lights, including LED high-mast lights, for every ward. Our teams check the lights regularly. They will be asked to be more vigilant and carry out repairs wherever required,” said Chakraborty.
