The Salt Lake civic body on Wednesday pulled down 10 illegal billboards, along with their lighting systems, and dismantled the metal frames that held them.

A team of 20 workers, accompanied by sub-assistant engineers and officials of the Bidhannagar Municipal Corporation (BMC), started the drive from the Broadway-EM Bypass crossing near the Sports Authority of India complex, commonly referred to as Building More.

The team moved along a 1km stretch of the Broadway — the road that connects Salt Lake with EM Bypass — from Building More to the Amul Island near the stadium
and pulled down 10 illegal
billboards by 6pm on Wednesday.

The team first pulled down the flexes and used gas cutters, welding torches and other tools to dismantle the iron frames holding them.

The LED lights that illuminated the billboards were removed from the frames. The hoardings that were dismantled were fitted to metal poles erected on pavements.

The drive against illegal hoardings has been spurred by an order issued by the Calcutta High Court division bench of Chief Justice T.S. Sivagnanam and Justice Hiranmay Bhattacharyya on November 21.

The bench directed the civic body to remove the billboards and recover the cost from the advertisers if they refused to dismantle the structures.

Earlier this month, the BMC issued a notice to all advertising agencies and individuals responsible for erecting around 2,500 illegal billboards to dismantle them.

The notice said that if the agencies and the individuals did not remove the billboards, the Salt Lake civic body would pull them down. The BMC would recover the cost of dismantling the billboards from the agencies and the individuals who erected them, the notice said.

Metro has reported on several occasions how illegal hoardings have mushroomed across Salt Lake and its adjoining areas, causing a loss of advertising revenue for the BMC.

A BMC official said most of the billboards that had been taken down on Wednesday had 10ft-wide and 20ft-tall metal frames on which flexes had been mounted.

“It took us more than an hour to get the flex off
each metal frame. Once a flex was down, we pulled down
the framework of lights,” the official said.

The sight of people pulling down hoardings and then cutting them up drew the attention of passersby and residents, many of whom captured the operation on their cellphones.

Samiran Banerjee, a resident of IB Block who was out on his evening walk, was seen shooting a video on his phone as the BMC team started dismantling a couple of hoardings near the stadium.

“These are everywhere across the township. Many have rusty frames. It is good that they are being dismantled,” said Banerjee.

Across the city, rickety and rusty metal frames of billboards that look like they can fall any moment are common sights.

The counsel for the BMC had told Calcutta High Court in November that nearly 2,500 billboards had been erected illegally and only 135 had the sanction of the authorities.

“Even the legal billboards have run a lot of arrears. The advertising agencies and the individuals that have put up the legal billboards had last paid taxes to the civic body in the 2018-19 fiscal,” the official said.

The executive engineer of the BMC, Monodip Mukherjee, said the drive would continue till all 2,500 illegal hoardings are dismantled.

“We started pulling them down today. Almost none of the agencies and individuals who had erected the illegal billboards dismantled them. More personnel will be deployed for the job from Thursday,” said Mukherjee.