Poor lighting on Delhi roads will now be a thing of the past with the government's new street lighting master plan envisaging a new visual identity for the capital before the 2010 Commonwealth Games.

Emphasising on common standards for road lighting across the capital as it was managed by various civic agencies, the master plan prepared by 'Delhi Transco Ltd' sets down common guidelines for "architectural lighting" along with energy saving options.

The plan admitted that the exisiting system of low-level lighting in the metro did not meet international standards and identified inadequacies in the monitoring system as one of the reasons for the poor show.

Transco's plan will not only upgrade the Delhi road lighting to an international level but also lead to energy conservation by introducing remote controlled switching, metering and automatic identification of lighting deficiency along major roads, officials said.

Pitching in with a new standardisation process, the plan admitted that presently there was "no standardisation of type of luminaries, leading to low aesthetic and unnecessarily high lamp wattage with limited impact".

Transco has also classified Delhi roads into three categories and has put in papers different quality parameters, specifications and evaluation criteria for street lighting.

As per an expert committee recommendation, the roads are classified into Category A-1 which consist of outer city roads, fly overs with higher traffic, A-2 the inner roads which have lesser traffic and a-3 all other roads.

It has also put in place a proper evaluation mechanism to access the energy consumption on different roads.

An evaluation criteria for tendering process has also been put in place.