The Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) will begin taking action against companies that fail to remove the hoardings installed before Durga Puja by Thursday, which marks the end of the deadline for their removal, an official said.
The temporary hoardings, put up on bamboo frames along several roads in the city, are supposed to be removed within seven days of Vijaya Dashami, according to new regulations made by the KMC.
A civic official said that inspectors from the KMC’s advertising division will locate Puja hoardings suspended from bamboo structures after the deadline and will impose fines on the brands.
This is the first time there is a deadline to remove the hoardings. Till last year, scores of hoardings would remain hanging from the bamboo frames for weeks after Durga Puja.
The Kolkata Municipal Corporation (Advertisement Policy) Regulations, 2025, says that “temporary advertisements (put up by both advertising agencies and Puja Committees) may be allowed from 7 (seven) days before Mahalaya and may be continued up to 7 (seven) days after Bijaya Dashami.”
The new regulations, notified in June, empower the civic body to impose a penalty that is three times the actual fee. The KMC can also recover the charges of removing the hoardings if the agencies fail to remove them on their own.
Officials said the KMC will impose a penalty on the brand associated with the product advertised on the hoarding if it continues to be displayed after the deadline. Previous experiences indicate that brands tend to halt payments to outdoor agencies once they are informed of the penalty by the KMC, said an official.
In past years, the KMC had to take down the hoardings and remove the bamboo used in the scaffoldings supporting the hoardings.
The owner of one outdoor advertising agency told Metro that even if all the hoardings were removed, the bamboo frames may stay on beyond the seven-day deadline. He said that decorators set up the bamboo frames, and the outdoor advertising agencies could not take them down.
Experiences of previous years have not been good for KMC officials.
A civic official said that the KMC had to remove several bamboo frames that the decorators had left behind.
“While we can identify the company from the hoarding, there is no way to know
which decorator erected a particular bamboo frame. The hard work of removing the bamboo frames then falls on us. We have to bear the entire cost without being able to recover any part of it,” said the official.