North Delhi Mayor Pretty Agarwal trains guns on unauthorised media

North Delhi Mayor Pretty Agarwal recently held a meeting with the officials of the Remunerative Project Cell Committee in which she directed the department to remove all unauthorised outdoor media put up within the zone, with immediate effect. The Mayor cited the dire need for the corporation to raise revenues, especially since there are delays in disbursing monthly salaries to the employees. She has pointed out that ad tax revenues have dropped by 50% because of mushrooming of unauthorised outdoor media in the zone.

The Mayor called for strong action against any official conniving with those erecting unauthorised media.

The North Delhi Municipal Corporation had launched a drive in end-2017 to remove illegal media. But the moot point is, how the structures came up in such a short time since.

“There is hardly any illegal media in the North Zone as the corporation had conducted a drive sometime back. Since all the sites are tendered as per the High Court bylaws there is no question of illegal media arising. These are just to gain brownie points,” said Shailendra Luthra, Director, Brite Neon Sign Pvt Ltd.

“Even if we assume that there is any illegal media existing, that will be negligible and couldn’t be the root cause of the corporation’s revenue losses”, Shaliendra added.

Echoing this view, Deepak Vasudeva, Director, Pioneer Publicity explained, “There are political hoardings that come up for various reasons but they don’t cause any huge revenue dent on the municipal’s revenues.”

Wherein Gaurav Gupta, Director, Sadhna Media articulated, “There is barely minute scope for erecting illegal media these days as the corporations allot tender on cluster basis in which the chances of erecting of illegal sites are low. However, it is indeed a welcome step as we have faced some amount of malpractices around our two clusters located in Karol Bagh & Punjabi Bagh where we faced losses because of unauthorised media”.