The number of hoardings on Calcutta’s roads will be reduced to 250 from over 400, the mayoral council member heading the Kolkata Municipal Corporation’s advertisement department said on Sunday.
Reducing the number of billboards will make the city look cleaner, reduce visual pollution and also help the civic body garner more revenue from the remaining street hoardings, said Debashis Kumar, mayoral council member, advertisement of the KMC.
The KMC has also decided to auction all street hoardings in the city from now on instead of taking the tender route.
Auctions will be more transparent and help the civic body earn more revenue, said a KMC official.
In an auction, the bidding parties sit together, and the competing parties can raise their quotations multiple times till they believe they will make a profit over the quoted price. This process will raise the prices of street hoardings being put up for auction.
In the tender process, the bidders submit their quotes in sealed covers without knowing what the competing parties are quoting. There is no scope to raise the quote in response to a competitor’s quoted price.
“We have already removed many street hoardings. We will remove many more. Our aim is to bring down the number of street hoardings in Calcutta to 250,” Kumar told The Telegraph on Sunday.
“Fewer street hoardings will declutter the city. It will also raise the price of advertising on a hoarding. If there are fewer platforms, companies will quote higher prices to buy the rights for the remaining ones,” Kumar said.
Street hoardings are the ones that stand on pavements and in public spaces. There are over 400 hoardings and 21 digital hoardings in the city.
There are hundreds of private hoardings that are on terraces and walls of buildings in Calcutta. The KMC has not said anything about whether it will also take these into consideration and reduce the number of private hoardings in the city.
Many of Calcutta’s streets are dotted with hoardings, sometimes with two almost touching each other.
The maintenance of the hoardings has also been an area of concern. Rusted metal frames of hoardings hang dangerously and have collapsed during storms in the past. Torn advertisements often flutter in the wind.
There are many unaccounted-for or illegal hoardings across Calcutta.
Sources in the civic body said the actual number of street hoardings, including illegal ones, would be much higher than 400. The KMC conducts drives to demolish illegal street hoardings, but they have not been done away with entirely.
The KMC has already earned over ₹2 crore by auctioning the gantries across Park Street that are used for decorative lighting during Christmas and New Year.
“The gantries remained empty for the rest of the year. We have given advertisement rights for 10 months, because the lights are put up for about two months only. We did this through an auction and received over ₹2 crore,” said Kumar.
Mayor Firhad Hakim, while commenting on the draft of the now-adopted advertisement policy in March 2023, had flagged how the city was cluttered with street hoardings.
“I am not happy with the (draft) advertisement policy. I have suggested some changes. If you travel along the roads of the city, there are hoardings one after another and very close to each other,” he had said.
“So many hoardings so close to one another do not allow a person sitting in a moving vehicle to register their content,” Hakim had said.