Consequent upon the meeting the Corporation Commissioner G. Latha had with engineers’ in-charge of street light maintenance, the civic body has put in place a mechanism to ensure that all street lights glow and complaints are redressed at the earliest.

As part of the mechanism, the Coimbatore Corporation issued a press release recently informing the public that it was engaged in the process of street light maintenance with the help of contractors for all the 100 wards in the Corporation.

If the public were to call the number of the contractor concerned, they would immediately attend to the complaints. Or if they were to register their complaints at the Coimbatore Corporation’s website —www.ccmc.gov.in, the Corporation would initiate similar action to ensure that the street lights were repaired at the earliest.

Ms. Latha said that at the end of the review meeting she had assigned the assistant engineers and junior engineers of wards the task of ensuring that the contractors repair the street lights at the earliest possible time. “I have also told them that they should treat short service messages, newspaper reports or complaints over phone as complaints to be attended to.”

After carrying out the repair the engineers should reply to the messages stating that they attended to the complaint by giving the date and time.

The old city area of 60 wards has around 37,000 street lights. The added area comprising 40 wards also has a similar number.

Ms. Latha said that the Corporation had also arranged for a third-party inspection. They would do random checking and also specific checking in that they would see if the complaints had been attended to.

Soon the Corporation would have a system where the street lights are also mapped using GIS.

This would be part of the GIS project that was under way in the Corporation.

Once the data was available the Corporation would integrate the same with the street light numbering exercise it carried out a couple of months ago for better street light management.