New floodlight system at KSCA

The Karnataka State Cricket Association (KSCA), known to regularly embrace change to suit the modern times, will be installing a new floodlight structure at an estimated cost of Rs 4.5 crore at the M Chinnaswamy stadium.

The current floodlight system, installed in 1995, a year before the Wills World Cup, will be replaced by an advanced structure, seen in many stadiums across the world.

“We are going from the lattice structure to unipole, which is the modern structure found all over the world,” Santosh Menon, secretary, KSCA, told DH on Friday.

The KSCA had called for a tender for the unipole structure recently. “The stability tenure of the current structure was till 2021. We could have re-painted it or somehow got it re-established. But we thought it’s better to upgrade it. The last time we worked on the floodlights was in 2011, when we changed the bulbs,” added Menon.

In the future, the KSCA plans to introduce LED lights. “We did a lot of research for this. At this point in time, LEDs are very costly. Apart from the cost, the fixtures are very heavy. If we go for LEDs right away, the structural design has to be very heavy and that’s not good at the moment. But after a lot of research, we have realised that these LED fixtures are going to become lighter and cheaper over a period of time. The technology is developing rapidly.

“Right now, if we were opting for LED fixtures, the average weight of each fixture would be between 32 and 38 kgs. So the entire current floodlight structure would have to be changed. Right now, we are going with a structure that can take 28 kgs for one fixture. Each pole can accommodate 100 bulbs. In the future, when we buy lighter LEDs, we just have to replace them with the metal-halide lamps,” explained Santosh.

The four new towers are set to be ready before this year’s Indian Premier League (IPL). “We are hoping to finish before the IPL, if at all the league takes place in India and Bengaluru hosts games,” he said.