After celebrating its centennial birthday earlier this month, the iconic golden’s Queen’s Necklace on the Marine Drive in Mumbai will be reclaiming its lost glow by bringing back sodium vapor lights, reported Indian media Mid Day.
The Brihanmumbai Electricity Supply and Transport (BEST) will be procuring two types of sodium vapor streetlights respectively 250 watts and 70 watts to illuminate roads, flyovers and bylanes. According to sources, the 1,350 streetlights procured by BEST are not LED lamps.
Even though the LED streetlights could save the city council energy bill considerably, and lower annual costs of acquiring 40,000 streetlights down to INR 800 million (US $12.06 million) from INR 1.64 billion for sodium vapor lights, the streetlight project has received a lot of backlash since upgrading to white LEDs.
Complaints from locals and opposition party the Shiv Sena followed for several months after the warm golden sodium vapor lights were swapped by the BEST to white LEDs in January this year.
The streetlight project initiated by the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) ruling party Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), later decided in August to change the LEDs to warmer white bulbs, as ruled by the Bombay High Court (HC), according to a report by The Indian Express.
Streetlights installed before Aug. 15, 2015 were supposedly to be replaced by yellow LEDs, but according to Shiv Sena members progress has come to a standstill. Following the court’s decision requesting BMC to swap back to yellow lights in Marine Drive, Energy Efficiency Services Limited (EESL), the government arm responsible for the lighting, tested the yellow lights.Yellow LED bulbs were installed on 16 of the 644 lamps at the NCPA end of Marine Drive to see if the lights illumination matched traditional lamps, but no progress followed afterwards, reported DNA.