LUDHIANA: The efforts of the municipal corporation (MC) authorities to install energy-efficient streetlights in the city for cutting upon power bill has borne fruits as on Friday four contractors applied for the tenders called by the civic body to install these lights in the city.

After failing to get the required quorum of contractors, a few days back, for the tenders called for the purpose, the MC had recalled tenders for the solar lights on December 18. Four agencies including MIT, Hyderabad, Green Light, Bangalore, Sanarti, Delhi, and Pranet Engineers Limited, Delhi, applied for the tenders on Friday for installing the energy efficient streetlights.

The MC officers, including the additional commissioner, Kanwalpreet Kaur Brar and executive engineer (XEN) SP Singh opened the bids of contractors. After checking technical bids and the guarantee bids and the earnest money, the officers accepted the tenders and announced that the financial bids for the same would be opened next week.

Commenting on it, additional commissioner Kanwalpreet Kaur Brar said that now that they have received all tenders they would scrutinize the entries and then allot work judiciously.

Earlier, the civic body had called tenders for installing the energy efficient streetlights in the city on November 26, however, in a major disappointment for the civic body officers, only two of them turned up on Thursday to apply for the tenders. As a minimum of three parties are needed for executing the tenders, the MC officers were in a dilemma regarding the future of the ambitious plan.

Notably, MC spends around Rs 24 crore annually on operating around 80,000 streetlights and 600 tubewells in the city. But the major part of the electricity bill is attributed to the streetlight system as it spends Rs 2 crore on its maintenance. This leads to a huge load on the civic body, which is already facing huge paucity of funds.