Nagar Nigam cancels streetlight maintenance contract with EESL

Dehradun: Dehradun Municipal Corporation also called as Dehradun Nagar Nigam has cancelled its contract for maintenance and repairs of streetlights in the city with EESL on account of poor performance. It may be recalled that EESL had been given the contract for the repairs and maintenance of street lights in all the wards of the capital. Now the company has been accused of not only poor performance but also of cheating the Municipal Corporation of lakhs of rupees every month. The Municipal Authorities claim that hundreds of complaints of street lights not working in many wards of the city are stated to be pending with the EESL not doing its job of repairing or replacing the lights.

In such a situation, now the Municipal Corporation has cancelled the maintenance contract with the company. The Nagar Nigam had awarded the contract of maintenance of streetlight and the repair work in 2017. Besides this, EESL had also been entrusted the task of replacing the old street lights and installing new street lights as well as their maintenance. However, many years later, the Nigam administration has now woken up to realise that EESL had actually handed over this work to another company in form of a sub contract.

EESL incidentally is one of the leading energy service companies of the Government of India.  But instead of doing the work itself, EESL handed over the work of installing and maintaining street lights to another company. The sub contractors did not bother to repair, or replace damaged streetlights in an earnest manner and often ignored complaints for long time. As a result, hundreds of streetlight across the city remain damaged but not replaced.

Garhwal Commissioner Vinay Shankar Pandey, who reached the Municipal Corporation office last fortnight had taken cognisance of this and had reprimanded the Municipal Corporation officials. The officials informed him that the sub contractors who got the contract from EESL are complaining of not being paid by EESL making it difficult for them to carry on repairs and the maintenance. It may be pertinent to remind here that EESL gets 24 lakh rupees every month for this work from Nagar Nigam. There are more than 97,000 street lights in the Dehradun municipal corporation limits. The municipal corporation pays EESL Rs 24 for repairing every single light and Rs 216 for installing a new light. The total average monthly billing of EESL is stated to be Rs 24 lakhs.