The Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) has issued notices to nearly 20 companies whose advertisements remained on billboards after the deadline for removal, set seven days after Bijoya Dashami, a civic official said on Friday.
The letters sent to these companies detail the specific locations where the hoardings were found, after the deadline had passed. A KMC official explained that these notices were based on hoardings observed along stretches of Rashbehari Avenue and Hatibagan.
The KMC, however, has not sent any notices to the advertising agencies responsible for putting up the hoardings.
“It is often difficult to pinpoint the specific advertising agency responsible for each hoarding. Therefore, we have followed the practice of sending the notices to the companies whose products are featured in the advertisement hoardings,” said the official.
According to the official, this approach stems from the tendency of companies to withhold payments to advertising agencies once they receive such notices. “Our letters include the location, the size of the hoarding, and the total fine amount. In the past, we have seen companies delay payments to the agencies once they are notified by the KMC,” the official added.
The KMC does not generate revenue from temporary hoardings put up ahead of Durga Puja, as the tax on such advertisements is waived for the occasion. However, the penalty for non-compliance includes not only the tax that should have been charged but also an additional fine of three times the actual tax amount.
Under the rules, the KMC also has the authority to recover costs if it has to remove the hoardings itself.
A KMC official told Metro that the letters were dispatched to the companies last week.
This is the first year that a strict deadline for removing temporary hoardings has been enforced. Under the new KMC rule, all hoardings and banners had to be taken down within seven days of Dashami, which fell on October 2 — making the deadline October 9.
Previously, hoardings remained up on bamboo frames across the city for much longer, with the KMC seemingly unable to take action.
The Kolkata Municipal Corporation (Advertisement Policy) Regulations, 2025 stipulate 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 Dashami.”
Despite this regulation, several hoardings are still hanging along various roads. In some areas, bamboo frames used to hang the hoardings remain in place.
According to a KMC official, the decorators who built the scaffolding structures have not dismantled these frames, likely because they are unwilling to retrieve the bamboo poles. “It becomes an additional burden for us to remove these poles. We then have to transport them to the Dhapa waste disposal ground,” the official explained.