Not just light on a pole: How street lighting shapes our cities

NEw DelhiIn dec 2019, a loretta young veterinary dr. Was raped and murdered on a darkness stretch along of a road in Hyderabad. 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 lights becoming a hotly debated subject in many cities.But six years on, not much has changed. Municipal surveys and corporate audits over the past year paint a grim picture: several roads and public spaces plunge into darkness in India’s biggest cities.Hyderabad’s municipal corporation recently announced a ₹1,340-crore overhaul after acknowledging 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 by this newspaper in Gurugram in May and June found several major roads in darkness, while a night audit by the Outer Ring Road Companies Association in Bengaluru found nearly 70% of lights along the city’s tech corridor weren’t working. In Delhi, a lack of upgrades and regular maintenance keeps several stretches dark or dim-lit.The consequences are costly, if not always visible: whether a streetlight works determines whether women feel safe walking after dark, or whether a street stays alive after 8pm or empties out. “The real problem in India is that street lighting is still seen as an electrical service rather than a tool for city-building,” says Hitesh Vaidya, urban expert and former director, 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 asked what makes a street usable after sunset. Good lighting is often the invisible layer of urban infrastructure, noticed only when it fails. Without it, cities effectively give up on half their public life every day.”Not just a bulb on a poleConversations about streetlights in India, says Vaidya, are often reduced to numbers — poles installed, LEDs replaced, electricity saved — rather than focusing on how to integrate lighting into larger city planning.Architect Shimul Javeri Kadri points out that Indian cities never had to think much about street lighting because light from homes, shops and vendors kept streets lit on their own—a by-product of mixed-use neighbourhoods rather than single-use zoning.Today’s planning tends to do the opposite: “Cities are increasingly designed around single-use zones; in BKC or Nariman Point in Mumbai, lights go dark by 7pm once offices close. With no vendors, no residents, there are no eyes on the street left, and safety drops drastically,” says Kadri.The solution, urban designer Aakash Hingorani says, lies in the kind of mixed-use planning the UN’s New Urban Agenda calls for — compact neighbourhoods that stay active and well-lit into the evening. But not every stretch can be mixed-use. “If the land use along a street is institutional — a campus, a park, long compound walls — those are passive edges that need far more careful pedestrian lighting.”So, the solution isn’t just more poles. It’s understanding where people actually walk.What cities abroad got rightSome cities treat street lighting as part of street design. New York’s Department of Transportation (NYCDOT) manages more than 400,000 streetlights across 10,000 km of roads and 19,000 km of sidewalks, treating the entire right-of-way — carriageway, sidewalks, bike paths — as one system. “Sidewalks are required to maintain illuminance of 10 to 20 lux, which can come from a combination of sources,” says Parul Agarwala, former country programme manager for India at UN-Habitat and a former planner at New York City’s planning department. New York’s focus on reducing glare and skyglow, and on comfort for people with sensory conditions is a model worth studying, she says. “Inclusive lighting matters as much as adequate lighting.”NYCDOT follows a street design manual that regulates what kind of lamppost is permitted where. “Every city should have a manual that spells out what kind of lighting each street needs --- not just lux levels and colour temperature, but whether the light makes a space feel inviting or leaves it colder than it actually is,” says Kadri.For women, she adds, the right lighting is a question of access to the city. “A woman’s freedom to move through her own city at any hour is one of the truest measures of how equal that city is, and light is one of the first things that grants or withdraws that freedom. But light alone can’t manufacture safety; it works best where there are already people on the street. A bright light over an empty, dead street is far less reassuring than a softly lit one with life around it.”Kalpana Vishwanath, co-founder , Safetipin, which has run safety audits across Indian cities for years, says lighting consistently ranks among the strongest factors in whether women feel comfortable using public space after dark. The solution, she says, is human-scale lighting designed for pedestrians, not tall median poles meant for cars. “Several cities are now acting on our safety audits. We recently submitted a detailed report to Gurugram, which badly needs improvement.”Prachi Gupta, a teacher in Gurugram, agrees. “There are occasions when I have to use my phone’s flashlight to navigate dark spots. It’s men deciding street lights for men. Public lighting has to be gender-sensitive,” she says.Kadri, who is also on the gender advisory committee at the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai, calls lighting “a gendered act” — women, she says, should be in the room when these decisions are made, at the design stage. Asked what the committee has actually recommended for Mumbai, she’s candid: “Neither I, nor the advisory committee, has been consulted on this.”But her own suggestion, she says, would be to prioritise women’s most-frequented routes: the lane between the station and home, the bus stop, the approach to a public toilet , “rather than lighting the main arterial road and believing it is done”.Who keeps the lights onMilind Mhaske, CEO, Praja Foundation, says street lighting gets low administrative priority despite adequate budgets — and it shows in how contracts are managed. Many cities have outsourced installation and maintenance to private firms or public-sector agencies, yet outages persist, thanks to weak oversight, lapse or termination of contracts either over poor performance or payment delays.Lucknow is a case in point. After its contract with EESL (Energy Efficiency Services Limited) ended, the municipal corporation took the work back in-house, but a staff shortage led to recurring outages, with residents of even upscale areas such as Hazratganj and Gomti Nagar repeatedly flagging poorly lit streets. Manoj Prabhat, chief engineer at the Lucknow Municipal Corporation, says it was maintaining around 250,000 streetlights with about 450 personnel until recently. “ We have recently hired 30 more staff. And we will be adopting LoRa-based systems in new areas to ensure faster response when lights fail,” he says.Several cities have recently announced far bigger overhauls of their public lighting. Delhi’s PWD has a ₹473-crore Smart City Lighting Project, with centralised monitoring and a “no performance, no payment” clause for contractors; Ahmedabad and Mumbai have their own big modernisation programmes underway.Tata Projects, which runs smart lighting systems in Pune, Nashik, Noida and Ludhiana under performance-based contracts, says digital monitoring has cut energy use by 56-62% while improving uptime.“Many cities relied on fragmented maintenance practices, which meant high rates of non-functional lights, delayed repairs, wasted energy, and limited visibility into asset performance,” says Rajendra Inani, vice president (water & smart cities) at Tata Projects. The fix, he says, has been a fully digital model. Faults are flagged automatically, repair teams deployed faster, and payments tied to performance.Kukreja sees a bigger opportunity once lighting is digitally connected: poles that double as hosts for sensors, EV charging, Wi-Fi, CCTV and air-quality monitoring—the backbone of a city’s smart infrastructure. “The challenge is keeping these projects design-led rather than just technology-led,” he says.Light as memoryLighting also creates memory and lends a city its character, say urban designers.Mumbai’s Marine Drive earned its nickname — the Queen’s Necklace — from the warm glow that traced the coastline every evening. When cooler white LEDs briefly replaced it, public pushback was swift, and the BMC restored the warmer tone. Some cities take their lighting heritage seriously. Los Angeles, for example, 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 drew up a city-wide Lighting Plan in 1989, revised most recently in 2023, treating light as a tool for urban transformation. “The plan’s intent is to showcase the city’s heritage through light, protect both energy use and nocturnal wildlife, and give citizens a real say in how their own neighbourhoods are lit,” she says. `Between 2000 and 2021, Lyon’s light points rose by more than a quarter, yet electricity consumption fell by half, and light pollution dropped. It also holds a multi-day Festival of Lights that draws tourists and revenue.Kadri also cites Kyoto’s outdoor advertising ordinance, which divides the city into eight landscape-control zones; the historic core permits almost no commercial signage. “The city treats the day-and-night visual character of its historic core as something worth protecting by law,” she says.Kukreja says cities are remembered as much for their night-time character as their daytime skyline. “The emotional connection people have with a place is often shaped by light—the warmth of a boulevard, the silhouette of a monument, the glow off a waterfront,” he says. When streets stay active into the evening, he adds, cities gain 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 night too.”