The Calcutta Municipal Corporation (CMC) will pull down temporary Puja hoardings that have been put up without its permission, mayor Firhad Hakim and mayoral council member Debashis Kumar told Metro on Tuesday.
Kumar, the mayoral council member in charge of the CMC’s advertisement department, said the civic body will start pulling down the illegal hoardings — the ones that have been put up without the CMC’s nod or without paying tax to the civic body.
Hakim, who is also the state urban development and municipal affairs minister, said he would ask the municipal corporations in Howrah and Bidhannagar to take action against illegal Puja hoardings that have been put up long before the festival.
The CMC and the other civic bodies near Calcutta have been losing revenue because of illegal hoardings throughout the year, Hakim said.
The actual revenue of these municipal bodies could have been “10 times more” from advertisements if not for illegal hoardings, he said.
“It is true that illegal hoardings have become a menace. There is a nexus of unholy businessmen and agencies who put up illegal hoardings. As a result, the municipalities and municipal corporations are losing revenue,” Hakim said.
“I have asked CMC officials to frame an advertisement policy but they are not doing it. I do not know why it is taking so much time to frame a policy,” he said.
Chief minister Mamata Banerjee has announced that Puja hoardings will be exempt from taxes but many feel that the agencies have used this as a ploy and put up the hoardings more than a month and a half before Puja.
Earlier, such hoardings used to appear two or three weeks before Puja but this year they have been around since late August. Mahalaya, seven days before the actual festival begins, is on October 14.
The temporary Puja hoardings are the ones that have come up on bamboo scaffoldings erected along many arterial roads, targeted at Puja shoppers.
In south Calcutta, such hoardings and scaffoldings have come up along Rashbehari Avenue and Hazra. In north Calcutta, bamboo scaffoldings have been erected along Raja Dinendra Street, Ultadanga Main Road, Vivekananda Road and close to Tallah Park, among other places.
On Monday, Kumar said Puja advertisements put up from October 1 will be exempt from paying tax to the CMC.
Kumar said only advertisements put up in the Puja month of October will get the tax sop. It is impractical to extend the sop to advertisements put up so many days ahead of Puja, he said.
Metro first reported on Sunday that dozens of temporary hoardings, often one above another, have sprung up along Rashbehari Avenue.
An online petition is demanding that the CMC frame guidelines on where and how these temporary hoardings can be installed. The petition said that the hoardings blocked the air passage to the buildings behind them and could pose a hindrance to firefighters in case of an emergency.
A CMC official said they were looking for the names of outdoor advertising agencies in the illegal hoardings and sending them notices to pay tax.
The rate at which outdoor advertising agencies have to pay the CMC for temporary hoardings is Rs 15/sq ft, said an official of the CMC.
Temporary hoardings can be between 6sq ft and 24sq ft in size. Any agency found to have installed a hoarding illegally can be asked to pay three times the actual fee as penalty, besides the fee itself, the official said.
Most of the hoardings have been put up without our permission and they are illegal, said the CMC official.
