Agra Nagar Nigam targets Rs 25 crore ad tax revenues in FY2018-19

Agra Nagar Nigam has a target of garnering Rs 25 crore ad tax revenues in FY2018-19. The corporation had earned a mere Rs 1.5 crore ad tax revenues in 2017-18, lower than Rs 2.5 crore that was earned from hoardings and banners in 2016-17 and Rs 3 crore in 2015-16.

Agra Nagar Nigam is now pro-actively taking steps to facilitate easy advertising in the city. In an exclusive conversation with Media4Growth, Ashish Singh, Executive Engineer- Traffic shared the reason behind the losses. “Primarily there were some mistakes from our side as well as we were confused about the GST application on the outdoor medium whether it is to be applied or not and if yes then the GST percentage wasn’t clear to us which caused us 50% revenue loss”.

The Nagar Nigam has removed the hoarding format from the city and replaced it with unipole format. Also this time, the authority has delved into the site selection procedure deeply and identified locations to erect sites and along with that the city has been divided into different zones in order to direct concentrated attention on the zones.

“The idea behind doing away with hoardings was to cut down the clutter in the city We have specified the sizes for unipoles and the tender for the same will be out in the coming 15 days. To make it beneficial for media owners, we will be giving the rights for 3 years out of which we will charge license fee for 2.5 years and fee for the rest of the time will be exempted so that media owners will be able to get suitable return on investments”, shared Singh.