Cuttack: The civic body would outsource administering of outdoor advertisements to check the menace of unauthorised billboards and hoardings here.

Municipal commissioner Bikash Ranjan Mohapatra on Saturday said the Cuttack Municipal Corporation will issue a tender inviting bids to manage outdoor advertisements across the city.

"The terms of the contract are being worked out. We will be ready to issue the tender notice shortly," Mohapatra said.

The civic body has been apparently in a quandary over streamlining outdoor advertisement as unauthorised billboards and hoardings continue to thrive without payment of tariff. To check the menace, the corporation had introduced the web-enabled system for registration of advertisers and self-declaration of advertisements in April last year.

Under the system, the civic body made online payment of tariff on the basis of self declarations by the advertisers mandatory. The hoardings and billboards of the advertisers, who fail to make the payment through online, were to be treated as unauthorised and removed without notice.

Sources said around 50 agencies had registered online and made self-declaration of advertisements. The self-declarations by the agencies indicated around 1,800 hoardings and billboards running to nearly 2.60 lakh sqft. Subsequently, a large number of hoardings not included in the online declarations was detected after physical verification. Though they were pulled down, numerous others came up again, making it difficult to detect the unauthorised hoardings, officials conceded.

"We plan to reorganise outdoor billboards and hoardings by asking a private party to manage them. The tender process will fetch more returns as a substantial amount of tariff is being lost to the unauthorised hoardings," Mohapatra said.

The civic body is able to mop up Rs 1.5 crore to Rs 1.75 crore from advertisement tariffs. Sources said an estimated Rs 40 lakh to Rs 50 lakh is lost to such billboards. "Besides, checking unauthorised hoardings will pave way for implementing the Odisha Advertisement and Hoarding Policy, 2015," Mohapatra said.

The state government rolled out the new rules through a gazette notification on January 21, 2016, but the corporation was yet to implement it. The new rule restricts placing of advertising device anywhere under any category which will obstruct free movement of the road users.

"Relocation of the hoardings and billboards, according to the guidelines of the new policy, will form part of the outsourcing contract," said a member of civic body's standing committee for licence and appeal.

The new policy prohibits location of billboards at major intersections, bends and curves and hoardings or advertisement boards that hinder the effectiveness of a traffic control system such as traffic light, stop or give way signs considering them as hazardous. It also prescribes the distance between two advertisements to be not less than 100 metres on main city roads and highways.