PANCHKULA: The plan of the municipal corporation (MC) to replace 18,500 street lights with LED smart street lights having a single control room for messages to enable repairs in quick time has been delayed by two months.The work was supposed to start from June but only technical bids have been opened so far. Once started, the project has to be completed within nine months.In May, the MC had taken out a tender on the orders of the department of urban local bodies (ULB) that had included Panchkula in cluster-I. Yamunanagar, Ambala, Kurukshetra and Karnal were the other cities in the cluster that would be getting new street lights.Senior officials of the ULB department stated that the prime motive was to save electricity consumption while on the other side a control and command centre would be built in each of the cities. The centre would be fully equipped with automatic systems. “If a street light goes non-functional, the smart system will send a message to the centre for its repair and the repair would be done by a private firm to be selected,” officials said.Mayor Kulbhushan Goyal said the selected agency will maintain street lights for 10 years. Goyal said the plan was to install 22,000 street lights in Panchkula. “Around 3,500 LED street lights have already been installed. The remaining 18,500 sodium LED lights are to be replaced soon,” he said.Goyal said a team had identified a few dark spots after conducting a survey. A plan to install street poles and lights at the dark spots would also be done, he added.According to the ULB plan, there were a total of 75,420 street lights in cluster-I. The ULB would install 54,494 new street lights in the cluster. One tender was opened on June 3 but it was not finalised till now.The budget for the entire cluster-I was Rs 102.68 crore. The budget for Panchkula was Rs 20 crore.Goyal said the MC had also hired a private company to maintain Sectors 20, 21, 25 and 26 street lights. A sum of Rs 10.50 lakh was also approved for the installation of the street light on the slip road in Sector 6.