The number of LED street lights in the country has doubled from 49 lakh in March 2018 to 1 crore on October 1, 2019. These lights are being installed under the Street Lighting National Programme (SLNP) that was launched on January 5, 2015 with the objective to replace all conventional street lights with smart and energy efficient LED street lights by March 2019.

This target was set to replace 1.34 crore conventional street lights with energy efficient LED lights by March 2019. Now the target for replacing these street lights has been fixed for March 2020.

Minister of State (Independent Charge) for Power and New and Renewable Energy, R K Singh, told BusinessLine , “This is a commendable feat because of the financial health of municipal bodies that implemented this programme. One has to take into account the scale of things in the country. The municipal bodies and state governments had to work together to complete this target.”

“This is the world’s largest such program and, in the program second closest to this, just 35 lakh street lamps were replaced. So we have already done more than thrice that,” he said.

Singh lit the 1 croreth LED street light using a remote control. The street light was installed in Gurugram in Haryana.

The installation of 1 crore LED street lights has resulted in annual energy savings of 6.71 billion kWh and avoided 1,119.40 MW of peak demand, resulting in reduction of Green House Gas emission by 4.63 million tonne CO2 every year, an official statement said.

The programme is voluntary in nature and runs without any budgetary allocation from the centre. The cost of using efficient lighting is repaid by municipalities from savings in energy and maintenance expenditure over a period of time.

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