The New Town authorities have decided to install LED lights across all three action areas, an official of the New Town Kolkata Development Authority (NKDA) said on Tuesday.

The LED streetlights will be fitted along the sidewalks of all block roads of New Town, the official said.

Although nearly all the main roads of New Town, including the 10.5km-long Major Arterial Road (MAR) that connects New Town with Salt Lake on the one end and the airport on the other, are lit up by LED lights, there are places where sodium vapour lamps as well as CFL lights and tube lights are in use.

According to a senior NKDA official, the decision to replace all streetlights with LED lights was taken to reduce power consumption and carbon footprint.

Some of these lights will be fitted with sensors. The luminance of such a light will increase by up to 40 per cent if the sensor detects an approaching vehicle.

These lights turn on automatically when it gets dark and can turn off when there is ample daylight, said an official of NKDA. Streetlights all over Calcutta are, at present, controlled manually from several operating centres.

“We will replace all streetlights with LED lights. We had installed quite a few smart streetlights and the results have been quite satisfactory. We intend to replace all the conventional LED lights in phases. There are 6,971 streetlights in New Town,” said Debashis Sen, the NKDA chairman.

“Each 180-watt LED streetlight has a main control panel at the top that acts as its ‘brain’,” a Hidco official said.

The control unit has infrared sensors and controllers to detect vehicle movement. The lights will operate at 60 to 80 per cent of their capacity when traffic is thin and become brighter when vehicle movement increases. The units are equipped with photosensitive sensors that can measure the ambient light around it.

Sen said the smart LED lights would help save electricity by ensuring optimum usage in various conditions.