Kolkata Municipal Corporation to remove Puja hoardings and frames within a week
Telegraph | 11 November 2024
The Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) has set a target to remove within a week all bamboo frames and temporary hoardings that were put up before Durga Puja, mayor Firhad Hakim said on Sunday.
The KMC commissioner issued a “communiqué” on Saturday saying the “temporary hoardings which have been installed before the onset of festive season” would have to be removed within seven days.
The commissioner’s communiqué, however, did not address the issue of the bamboo frames on pavements on which the temporary hoardings were installed.
On Sunday, Hakim told Metro that the frames would also be removed within a week. “We will get these removed within seven days,” Hakim said.
This newspaper reported on Saturday that iron poles dug into the road and pavements were still standing along a 250-metre stretch of Rashbehari Avenue, between Priya cinema and Mahanirvan Math. The Tridhara Sammilani Durga Puja committee had installed the poles to display digital advertisements.
On Sunday, the iron poles were no longer there. Debashis Kumar, a mayoral council member of the KMC and one of the organisers of the Tridhara puja, had promised to get the poles removed.
Bamboo frames and temporary hoardings are still present in many places in the city. On Sunday, this newspaper spotted bamboo frames along Hazra Road, Rashbehari Avenue, Bhupen Bose Avenue, CR Avenue and near the 8B bus stand in Jadavpur, among other places.
All the places except the 8B bus stand had only bamboo frames. In Jadavpur, temporary hoardings were still hanging. “These were put up before Durga Puja and have not been removed,” said a resident of the locality.
A senior KMC official said the civic body had asked the advertising agencies to remove all banners and flexes by October 15, a day after the Durga Puja carnival was held on Red Road.
The instruction had been passed on to the agencies even before they started setting up the structures in the run-up to Durga Puja. “It was assumed that the bamboo poles would be removed, too, but that has not happened,” the official said on Sunday.
“Many temporary hoardings along Harish Mukherjee Road and some other roads in south Calcutta were pulled down on Saturday night. Similar drives will be undertaken on Monday, too. We are expecting that all temporary hoardings will be removed by then. If anything is left behind, we will complete the task within a week,” the official said.
“We will start removing the bamboo frames onTuesday.”
The KMC has imposed penalties on around 70 advertising agencies and companies whose products were advertised on temporary hoardings that had not been removed by October 15, the official said.
Last year, too, the KMC had to step in and remove bamboo frames in several places as neither the puja committees that had put up the frames nor the advertising agencies that installed the hoardings bothered to remove them.
The official said puja committees could not be held accountable for the bamboo structures that still remain as the poles have no tags mentioning the names of the organisers.