New Delhi
In December 2019, a young veterinarian was raped and murdered on a dark street in Hyderabad. A few days later, women across the city launched an online campaign, ‘Light Up Hyderabad’, demanding that dark stretches, broken streetlights and blind spots be mapped and fixed.
The campaign went viral, with the lack of proper street lighting in many cities becoming a hotly debated topic.
But even after six years, not much has changed. Municipal surveys and corporate audits over the past year paint a grim picture: Many streets and public spaces in India’s largest cities have been plunged into darkness.
Hyderabad Municipal Corporation recently made an announcement ₹₹1,340 crore overhaul after admitting that more than 70% of its 760,000 streetlights were nearing the end of their operational life, with 20–30% either non-functional or providing inadequate illumination. Spot-checks conducted by this newspaper in Gurugram in May and June found that many major roads were in darkness, while a night audit by the Outer Ring Road Companies Association in Bengaluru found that about 70% of the lights in the city’s tech corridor were not working. In Delhi, many parts remain dark or dimly lit due to lack of upgrades and regular maintenance.
The consequences are costly, if not always visible: whether streetlights work determines whether women feel safe walking after dark, or whether a street remains operational or empty after 8 p.m.
“The real problem in India is that street lighting is still seen as an electrical service rather than a city-building tool,” says Hitesh Vaidya, an urban expert and former director of the National Institute of Urban Affairs. “It’s about making people feel safe, supporting markets, encouraging walking and activating public spaces.”
Architect Dikshu Kukreja agrees: “We have invested heavily in roads, flyovers and buildings, but rarely ask what makes a road usable after sunset. Good lighting is often the invisible layer of urban infrastructure, which is noticed only when it fails. Without it, cities effectively lose half their public life every day.”
Not just a bulb on a pole
Vaidya says the conversation about street lights in India is often reduced to numbers – poles installed, LEDs replaced, electricity saved – rather than focusing on how to integrate lighting into the larger city plan.
Architect Shimul Zaveri Qadri explains that Indian cities never had to think much about street lighting because the streets were lit automatically by lights from homes, shops and vendors – a by-product of mixed-use neighborhoods rather than single-use zoning.
Today’s planning is the opposite: “Cities are increasingly being designed around single-use areas; in BKC or Nariman Point in Mumbai, lights are off by 7 pm after offices close. No vendors, no residents, no eyes on the street, and security is drastically reduced,” says Qadri.
The solution, says urban designer Akash Hingorani, lies in mixed-use planning in line with the UN’s new urban agenda – compact neighborhoods that are active and well-lit in the evening. But not every stretch can be used in combination. “If the land use along a street is institutionalized – a campus, a park, tall campus walls – then those are passive edges that require more careful lighting for pedestrians.”
So, the solution isn’t just more poles. It’s about understanding where people actually move.
Which cities were found correct abroad
Some cities consider street lighting as part of street design. The New York Department of Transportation (NYCDOT) manages more than 400,000 streetlights on 10,000 km of roads and 19,000 km of sidewalks, treating the entire route – carriageway, sidewalk, bike path – as a system. “Sidewalks need to maintain 10 to 20 lux of illumination, which can come from a combination of sources,” says Parul Agarwal, former country program manager for India at UN-Habitat and former planner at New York City’s Planning Department. New York’s focus on reducing glare and sky glare, and on comfort for people with sensory conditions, is a model worth studying, she says. “Inclusive lighting matters just as much as adequate lighting.”
NYCDOT follows a street design manual that regulates where and what types of lampposts are allowed. “Each city should have a manual that explains what kind of lighting each street needs – not just lux level and color temperature, but also whether the lighting makes a space feel attractive or makes it cooler than it really is,” says Qadri.
She adds that for women it is a question of access to the right city lights. “A woman’s freedom to move about her city at any time is the truest measure of how equal that city is, and light is one of the first things that grants or takes away that freedom. But light alone cannot create safety; it works best where there are already people on the street. A bright light on an empty, dead street is much less reassuring than a softly lit street with life all around it.”
Kalpana Vishwanath, co-founder of Safetipin, who has run safety audits in Indian cities for years, says light is consistently one of the strongest factors for whether women feel comfortable using a public space after dark. The solution, she says, is human-scale lighting designed for pedestrians, not tall center poles built for cars. “Many cities are now working on our safety audits. We recently submitted a detailed report to Gurugram, which is in dire need of improvement.”
Gurugram teacher Prachi Gupta agrees with this. “There are times when I have to use my phone’s flashlight to navigate in dark places. Street lights for men are decided by men. Public lighting should be gender-sensitive,” she says.
Qadri, who is also on the gender advisory committee at the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai, calls lighting “a gendered task” – she says that at the design stage, when these decisions are taken, women should be in the room. Asked what the committee actually recommended for Mumbai, he said candidly: “Neither I, nor the advisory committee, have been consulted on this.”
But her own suggestion, would be to prioritize the routes women frequent: the lane between station and home, bus stops, access to public toilets, “rather than just lighting up the main road and assuming it’s done”.
who keeps the lights on
Milind Mhaske, CEO of Praja Foundation, says street lighting receives low administrative priority despite adequate budgets – and this shows in how contracts are managed. Many cities have outsourced installation and maintenance to private firms or public sector agencies, yet curtailments continue due to weak inspections, defaults or termination of contracts due to poor performance or delays in payments.
The matter is of Lucknow. After the contract with EESL (Energy Efficiency Services Limited) expired, the Municipal Corporation took the work back in-house, but lack of staff led to frequent power cuts, even as residents of upscale areas like Hazratganj and Gomti Nagar repeatedly complained about poorly lit streets.
Manoj Prabhat, chief engineer of Lucknow Municipal Corporation, says it was maintaining about 250,000 street lights with about 450 personnel till recently. “We have recently hired 30 more employees. And we will be adopting LoRa-based systems in new areas to ensure faster response when lights go off,” he says.
Many cities have recently announced major changes to their public lighting systems. Delhi’s PWD has ₹Rs 473 crore smart city lighting project, with centralized monitoring and “no performance, no payment” clause for contractors; Ahmedabad and Mumbai have their own major modernization programs underway.
Tata Projects, which runs smart lighting systems in Pune, Nashik, Noida and Ludhiana under performance-based contracts, says digital monitoring has reduced energy usage by 56-62% while improving uptime.
“Many cities relied on fragmented maintenance practices, which meant high rates of non-functional lights, delayed repairs, energy wastage and limited visibility into asset performance,” says Rajendra Inani, vice president (water and smart cities), Tata Projects. He says that the solution has been a completely digital model. Defects are flagged automatically, repair teams are deployed rapidly, and payment is linked to performance.
Kukreja sees a huge opportunity once lighting becomes digitally connected: poles that serve as hosts for sensors, EV charging, Wi-Fi, CCTV and air-quality monitoring – the backbone of the city’s smart infrastructure. “The challenge is to keep these projects design-based rather than just technology-based,” he says.
light as memory
Urban designers say that light also creates memory and gives a city its character.
Mumbai’s Marine Drive gets its nickname – the Queen’s Necklace – from the warm glow that falls on the beach every evening. When cool white LEDs replaced it for a short time, public reaction was swift, and BMC reinstated the warm tone.
Some cities take their lighting heritage seriously. For example, Los Angeles has a dedicated Bureau of Street Lighting – and even a street lighting museum tracing the city’s lighting history.
But Kadri says Lyon, France’s second-largest city, is a better example. It produced a city-wide lighting plan in 1989, most recently revised to 2023, which considered lighting as a tool for urban transformation. She says, “The intention of the scheme is to showcase the city’s heritage through light, protecting both energy use and nocturnal wildlife, and giving citizens a say in how their neighborhoods are illuminated.” `
Between 2000 and 2021, Lyon’s light points increased by more than a quarter, yet electricity consumption halved and light pollution declined. It also hosts a multi-day light festival that attracts tourists and revenue.
Kadri also cites Kyoto’s outdoor advertising ordinance, which divides the city into eight landscape-control zones; The historic core allows almost no commercial signage. “The city regards the day-and-night visual character of its historic center as something worth protecting by law,” she says.
Kukreja says cities are remembered as much for their night-time character as for their daytime skylines. He says, “People’s emotional connection with a place is often shaped by light – the warmth of a boulevard, the shade of a monument, the glow of a coast.” He says that when streets remain active well into the evening, cities benefit economically through longer business hours, culturally through greater use of public space, and socially through stronger community ties. “It tells residents that public space belongs to everyone, not only during the day, but also during the night.”
