MP High Court directs municipal body to remove roadside hoardings

To safeguard the pedestrians and traffic movement around the Indore city, the Madhya Pradesh High Court directed a judgment to the Indore Municipal Corporation saying no permission will be given for roadside hoardings in the city. The division bench of Justice PK Jaiswal and Justice Alok Verma in its order dated August 24, has upheld that roadside hoarding are hazardous and a disturbance to the traffic movement, directing the IMC to remove all hoardings irrespective of its kind.

The order directing the removal of hoardings was issued by the court in 2016 in a writ appeal filed by the Indore Hoarding Traders Association, after which the revision petition was filed by the IMC. A week later, the petition was dismissed, upholding the previous order.

The association had moved the court when one of the hoardings, which was granted license for 2014-15, was served removal notice after the expiry of the license, despite application for its renewal.

As on date, none of the city based media owners has been intimated by the corporation of the removal of any such media. “There hasn’t been any notification from the authority given to us. The roadside media was tendered by the authority last year for the duration of 5 years and if they breach the contract then it will definitely be a big loss to the investors. If any legal media will be removed then we will take action against them as we have invested a huge amount and since it is a new tender, we haven’t reached the break-even of our revenue,” said Ashish Neema, Partner, Go Media.

Adding to this, Vivek Jain, Director, Anant Publicity said, “The current installed media is entirely legal and newly tendered which has been approved as per the guidelines. There shouldn’t be any detrimental action taken by the municipal authority”.