CANACONA
The Goa Tourism erected high-mast lamp at Agonda coast is hardly seen illuminated for several months together and has remained just an ornamental piece since it was installed a year ago.
According to residents, this high-mast lamp manufactured was installed by Goa Tourism in April last year.
"Since it was installed in April last year, it worked for about three months, but later stopped functioning and the locality mostly plummets into darkness. Our calls to the numbers provided on the lamp post for maintenance/repairs fell on deaf ears and failed to illuminate the lamp," said a resident.
"However, it was repaired once after several months of darkness, but later it went off again within 3-4 days of its servicing somewhere in the middle of last tourist season (which also ended abruptly in mid-March) and since than it is non-functional," informed another villager.
Villagers said that the contact numbers provided on the lamp post, except for attending the calls, turned up to repair the lamp only once after months of calling, which worked only for a couple of days.
As per the display, Goa Tourism is also supposed to maintain it and had provided two contact numbers for lodging complaints of non-functioning of the high-mast lamp.
Incidentally, the lamp post is erected at the central location of the village, right at the church front facade, illuminating the approach road and the two roads (one on left and another on the right side) proceeding to the beach coast in two different directions.
Villagers also informed, that after this installation of the high-mast lamp, the previously working street sodium lamps were shut down, now keeping the main streets of the village in total darkness due to the non-functional high-mast lamps.
