KARACHI: The Karachi Metropolitan Corporation has planned to install solar panel lights in city parks to cut electricity bill expenses totalling in tens of millions of rupees, City Mayor Wasim Akhtar has said.

Briefing the media persons at his office on Sunday after a meeting with a company dealing in solar panel lights, the city mayor said that initially a company had offered to install solar street lights on M. M. Alam Road, Malir Cantonment, on an experimental basis.

He said that the installation work of the solar lights on the over 9-kilometer long M. M. Alam would start in a couple of days and was expected to be completed in a few weeks.

He said that after the successful experiment of solar lights on M. M. Alam road the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation would go ahead with its plan of installation of solar lights on Bagh-i-Ibn-i-Qasim.

The mayor said that during the meeting the company had said that over 3,885 solar panels would be installed to power solar lights to keep the Bagh-i-Ibn-i-Qasim illuminated.

He said that if this experiment succeeded then plans would be made to illuminate other city parks with solar lights so that the civic agency, which paid tens of millions of rupees monthly in power bills, could save the money that could be spent on other development projects.

Mr Akhtar said that the company had already installed the solar lights in the Fatima Jinnah Park in Islamabad.

Published in Dawn, January 29th, 2018