Officially, there are 130 billboards in Salt Lake and along VIP Road, including Lake Town, Kaikhali, Baguiati and the airport. But Bidhannagar Municipal Corporation (BMC) officials said the actual number has crossed 2,000 and the number is going up rapidly.

According to civic body sources, revenue collection from billboards and hoardings in areas falling under the corporation has been abysmally low as most of these hoardings are illegal.

Last Friday, the BMC started a drive to remove illegal hoardings. Around 25 illegal hoardings were taken off from places like the areas in front of the City Centre, the Karunamoyee intersection and Kaikhali.

Across the city, the Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) has pulled down about 3,000 “unauthorised” hoardings in the past two months. About 40 of them were private hoardings that stood on terraces. In many cases, the KMC removed the advertisements and also dismantled the iron frames.

A senior official of the BMC said that every year outdoor advertising agencies have to submit ₹90,000 as revenue tax to the civic body for a hoarding measuring around 20x10feet. The last time the agencies had paid any taxes to the civic body was in the financial year 2018-2019, the official said.

“Bills have been sent out to the agencies but none have cleared their dues for the past five years. The 130 billboards that we have in our records, too, have arrears. The corporation’s earnings per year from these 130 hoardings alone would stand at ₹1.17 crore if we consider that they span 20x10 feet,” said the official.

The safety of the iron scaffolding and structures has always been a concern.

The urban local bodies in Calcutta and Salt Lake do not check the stability of the iron structures.

Both KMC and BMC officials said that checking their structural stability is the responsibility of outdoor advertising agencies.

In June more than 15 people were killed after a giant hoarding fell on top of a petrol pump in Mumbai.

BMC mayor Krishna Chakraborty said the drive against illegal hoardings will continue.

“Advertising agencies are earning huge sums from these illegal hoardings. Our revenue earning has stopped completely in terms of advertisement tax. We have started identifying illegal hoardings and are pulling them down. The hoardings should also be regulated as they have sprung up everywhere. Several residents have complained that they have turned the surroundings ugly,” Chakraborty said.

Large chunks of Salt Lake as well as VIP Road are now hidden behind ugly structures supporting billboards.

Another senior BMC official said that there have been instances when those who had set up billboards could not be traced after they started to hang dangerously over roads.

“There are several extremely weak structures that have listed over roads in the past. After Cyclone Amphan as well as Remal we had to cut down the shoddy structures. During that time we could not trace the owner or the agency that had put up the billboard,” said the official.

Krishna Kanta Saha, the chairman of the Outdoor Advertising Forum, Bidhannagar chapter, said the agencies setting up the billboards wanted to clear their arrears.

“The civic body should have a meeting with us. All the agencies active in the area want to run their businesses legitimately,” said Saha who is the owner of the Karukrit Advertising Private Limited.

Sujoy Saha, another member of the forum, said that they had been alerting the civic body about the illegal billboards for a long time.

“They have been set up with the connivance of local councillors and local party leadership of the Trinamool Congress. We have sent multiple letters to the BMC alerting both the municipal commissioner and the mayor about this issue. To date, the civic body has taken no action. Instead, it has started removing billboards arbitrarily without serving any notice,” said Saha

He admitted that they had not paid any advertisement tax to the civic body since 2019.