PTI

Chandigarh: Sydney has shown the way by releasing worldwide pictures of what the city looks like at night with all lights merrily twinkling and with a bare minimum of lighting, with the latter helping it conserve electricity and do its bit in making a positive contribution to the cause of global warming.

While in India the cause may well be necessitated with more basic survival issues and of managing limited resources, the idea has sparked off a slew of research initiatives. The latest to be go public is a study by a Chandigarh based group that opines, “Effective management of streetlights in the late night hours can save India over Rs 10,000 crore, an amount that could go for the setting up of three power plants of 1000 mw each.”

The group Citizens’ Council suggests switching off every alternate streetlight after midnight, which means there will be lights at a gap of 100 metres instead of 50 metres.

The council said if you go on the streets after midnight, you will find hardly anyone on the streets, yet all the lights would be blazing, consuming precious electricity that could be of tremendous use to a power-starved industry, farmers for their tube wells as well as the common citizen.

The solution would be to switch off every alternate streetlight after midnight. Typically, each streetlight is at a distance of 50 metres from each other. After midnight, the light would be at 100 metres distance, which is more than adequate for security purposes, the Council opined.

The Council said switching off alternate streetlights is easily possible with a very low capital requirement since the streetlights with underground wiring are powered from a three-circuit cable that runs below all the streetlights.

“What this means is that if one circuit is switched off, one in every three streetlights would automatically be turned off. All that is required to do is to set timers to switch off the lights in 2 of the 3 circuits,” the Council suggested.