Smart streetlights making the city safer in Pune, India

April 20, 2020

This streetlighting project in India improves road safety while reducing downtime and energy consumption
 

How many times did you walk down a dark street, wishing there were more lights to brighten the way? You’re not the only one. In Pune – a city said to have the highest number of pubs in Asia – dark streets were becoming a cause for public concern.
 

However, conventional streetlights were a costly and unreliable solution, leaving nearly three million people with poor public lighting. In a city of such a size, the authorities realized that making the residents feel safe was becoming critical.

For the conventional streetlights Pune used to use, finding problems and ultimately repairing them was a slow-moving manual process, meaning a long downtime between outage and repair. For the city of Pune and its three million residents, this made driving in overcrowded streets even more dangerous.
 

Thanks to the Interact City system all street lighting is now remotely connected, monitored, and controlled from a single room. This allows city authorities to identify faulty streetlights within seconds by receiving automatic SMS messages with fault notifications on their registered devices.

The issue can then be resolved quickly; by enabling faster responses, Interact City increases visibility on the roads, reduces downtime, and helps citizens feel safer at night.

The best results are achieved when we work together, which is why the citizens of Pune can now provide their own feedback to the project. They can now report streetlights that aren’t working properly, allowing the operations team to act faster to solve issues. The Interact City system allows them to collaborate with the authorities by contacting them via a mobile app or calling a toll-free number.  By empowering citizens to meaningfully participate in the caretaking process, the system offers further civic engagement benefits.