The Calcutta Municipal Corporation (CMC) has stopped giving permissions to set up small rectangular hoardings on electric poles and asked outdoor advertising agencies to take down the ones that were put up earlier.
The decision to not have any hoardings hanging from electric poles is aimed at reducing risks of electrocution from the hoardings. Besides, the poles with such hoardings are structurally unsafe because of the additional weight and are at risk of being toppled.
While the civic body stopped issuing permissions for hoardings on street poles around a year ago, a formal decision to ban the hoardings was taken at a meeting before Cyclone Remal last month, a CMC official said.
The official said some of these hoardings have electric connections and are lit from inside. If the road below is flooded, a frequent occurrence during the monsoon, then a loose wire of an internally lit hoarding can cause electrocution.
“The hoardings are heavy enough to pull down the poles during strong winds and storms,” a CMC official said. Leaning electric poles or traffic signal posts with such hoardings after a storm is a common sight in Calcutta.
The hoardings that can be illuminated from inside can weigh up to 12kg, the official said. The others weigh around 2kg.
“The combination of the weight and the impact of the wind hitting the hoardings can pull down a pole during strong winds or a storm. That is one reason why we have decided to ban hoardings hanging from poles,” the official said.
The CMC does not keep count of the number of such hoardings in the city, but an official said there could be more than a thousand hoardings hanging from street poles.
A few of them, along the stretch of Rashbehari Avenue between Gariahat and the Ballygunge bridge, have been removed following the decision to ban the hoardings. But in most other places the hoardings continue to hang from electric poles.
“We have asked the outdoor advertising agencies to take down the hoardings. If they don’t, we pull them down,” said the official.
Hoardings hang from traffic signal posts, too. A CMC official said an outdoor advertising agency has to take permission from police, not the civic body, to hang hoardings from signal posts.
The Telegraph has published several reports highlighting the danger posed by hoardings. There is hardly any check by the authorities on the safety of the structures.
Hoardings hanging from electric poles are only one of the several types of hoardings in the city. There are about 410 street hoardings, the ones that stand on pavements. Many of them have become rickety and tin plates from the structures flutter dangerously. Many of the structures have rusted and are broken in parts.
There are more than 2,500 private hoardings that are stuck to walls or installed on terraces of private buildings.
CMC officials have admitted earlier that the civic body does not have enough personnel to check the condition of the hoardings and have to depend on outdoor agencies that have put them up. The CMC asks the agencies to keep tabs on the stability of the hoardings.
