A draft advertisement policy for Kolkata, which could have reduced the number of hoardings in the city and improved monitoring of the structures, was published in May 2022 but has yet to be formalised, civic officials said.
There is no word yet on when the policy would be finalised and implemented.
The city’s roads are lined with rickety or broken hoardings, some of which lean dangerously over a road or a pavement.
Tin plates have loosened from the hoardings and they flutter in the wind. The frames of some of the hoardings have developed cracks and bent.
The Telegraph found many such hoardings in Kolkata on Tuesday, a day after a nor’wester left trail of destruction across the city. Their condition suggested they had not been maintained for weeks.
Officials of the Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) said the structures are checked periodically but the condition of hoardings along Syed Amir Ali Avenue, AJC Bose Road and Camac Street suggest they have evaded monitoring for long.
Such hoardings can collapse and cause injury or death during a storm.
A senior KMC official told this newspaper on Wednesday that the advertisement policy was yet to be adopted.
“We have proposed that a committee be set up to go through the policy and suggest changes. The committee could set a limit on the number of hoardings along a road,” said the official.
Debashis Kumar, mayoral council member in charge of the KMC’s parks and squares department, said only the committee could say when the policy would be finalised.
“The committee will decide how long they will deliberate on the matter,” he said.
The draft policy says two hoardings should be at least 8.2ft apart. There are multiple stretches in the city where the gap between two hoardings are 2ft or 3ft.
Four hoardings are placed one beside another, with little space among them, in front of the Mouchak sweet store at Golpark.
At the Sarat Bose Road-Rashbehari Avenue crossing, too, hoardings stand close to one another.
According to the KMC’s records, there are about 250 hoardings along roads or pavements in Kolkata. Officials, however, said the actual count is much higher.
Mayor Firhad Hakim had said in March that he was unhappy with the draft policy and had told officials to make some changes.
“I am not happy with the (draft) advertisement policy. I have suggested some changes. If you travel through Kolkata, you will find hoardings very close to each other,” Hakim had said.
“So many hoardings so close to each other do not allow someone sitting in a moving vehicle to watch what is displayed on them.”
The positioning of hoardings along a street, the mayor had said, is not very “scientific”.
Kamalika Bose, an architect from Kolkata who is now based in Mumbai, said India’s financial capital has done better than Kolkata in reducing the number of hoardings along streets.
“The heritage zones in Mumbai are bereft of any hoardings. Outside the heritage zones, the number is far fewer than what we see in Kolkata,” Bose said.
Abin Chaudhuri, an architect who has designed several public spaces in Kolkata, said hoardings can be designed in a way that they remain sturdy.
“One cannot just erect a hoarding anywhere. The structures have to be designed properly. That will ensure the hoardings do not tilt. Periodic maintenance is important,” he said.
Fewer hoardings would make roads cleaner.
