Ghaziabad: Civic body makes all traffic signals operational a week after they went on the blink

The signals across the city went on the blink on April 7 after the corporation refused to renew the contract of the private maintenance agency that was handling them

Ghaziabad: A week after traffic signals across the city stopped working, the Ghaziabad municipal corporation has taken over all 48 signals and rectified the faults.

The Ghaziabad Municipal Corporation has taken over and repaired all 48 traffic signals across the city. (Sakib Ali/HT Photo)

The signals across the city went on the blink on April 7 after the corporation refused to renew the contract of the private maintenance agency that was handling them.

In the absence of functional signals, the Ghaziabad traffic police was manually regulating traffic at all major intersections from 7am to 10pm daily. This led to long tailbacks at all signals during rush hour, said traffic police.

“Now, we are operating the signals and do not need further assistance from the traffic police,” Vikramaditya Malik, municipal commissioner (Ghaziabad) on Monday.

“All 48 signals are now functional and we are taking up their operation and maintenance. Two of these were found to be permanently out of order. We will now entrust the maintenance work to another firm. All these signals will be taken over under the integrated traffic management system project, once it gets underway,” said Malik.

The corporation officials said after the signals stopped working on, they got two first information reports (FIRs) registered against several officials of the private firm while a petition is also pending in the Supreme Court over the refusal to renew the contract.

Officials of Shiv Shakti Dream Homes Pvt Ltd, the private maintenance agency, had earlier said their contract was not renewed due to certain “political motives” and two persons named in the FIRs do not belong to their firm.

They said the issue happened because “people in high political ranks” got their contract scrapped over frivolous pretexts to facilitate another firm.

“The scrapping of our contract has the backing of politicians. Our firm was given NOCs (no objection certificates) by the traffic police several times. Still, the corporation claimed that our work was not satisfactory. They cut off our advertising unipoles on Saturday night (April 6), and blamed us for traffic signals going defunct. We did not snap any cables or tamper with any traffic signal,” Harish Sharma, director, Shiv Shakti Dream Homes said on April 9.