The Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) on Tuesday emailed all advertising agencies in the city asking them to check the billboards and undertake repairs wherever necessary, in the wake of the collapse of a giant billboard in Mumbai on Monday that killed at least 14 people.

There are about 2,900 hoardings or billboards in the city that are registered with the KMC. About 410 of them are street hoardings — the ones that have poles rising from pavements. The rest are hoardings stuck into the walls of buildings or standing on terraces.

The second group of hoardings, called private hoardings by the KMC, are more dangerous because they are located much above the road level. If any of these hoardings collapse from such a height, they can maim or kill people.

The KMC, the custodian of the city’s public spaces, does not ask for periodic health
reports of the hoardings from the agencies managing them.

The only thing an agency has to do is submit a structural stability certificate signed by an engineer when the hoarding is set up.

There are also a large number of illegal hoardings in the city, none of which is monitored by any agency.

Legal or illegal, the city is dotted with hundreds of rusted and rickety billboards or scaffoldings with tattered flexes that flutter scarily every time there is a gust of wind.

“We do not go and check the health of the hoardings or billboards. There are outdoor advertising agencies that have the right to put up advertisements on hoardings. We write them from time to time to check the health of the hoardings,” said a senior KMC official.

“We emailed to all the agencies again on Tuesday asking them to check the condition of the hoardings and undertake necessary repairs,” the KMC official said.

Kesto Saha, a director of the outdoor advertising agency Karukrit, said they received the email.

“The association of outdoor advertising agencies has also told its members to check the billboards once again,” said Saha.

Metro has reported multiple times about rickety and rusted hoardings in the city. It is not rare to see loose ends of iron frames of privatehoardings.

The tin plates of street hoardings are often found fluttering in the wind.

A giant street hoarding opposite ITC Royal Bengal collapsed during the storm on May 7, the day a gust of wind reached 77kmph.

No one was injured because the hoarding fell inside a barricaded compound.

A KMC official said anyone riding through the Parama flyover would come across several hoardings stuck into walls of buildings that are “not in a good condition”.

“We have introduced a provision in our draft advertisement policy that all hoardings in the city must have third party insurance. Besides, we have kept a provision that periodic health reports of all hoardings must be submitted to the KMC every three to four years,” he said.

The draft advertisement policy was first published in May 2022, but it has yet to be adopted.