Rooting out billboards: DMCs up their game, cantts lag behind

SC ordered removal from public property by June 30

KARACHI: The city that turned into a ‘giant advertisement’ due to the clutter of billboards in the last one decade is slowly being cleaned of the colourful menace after Supreme Court (SC) orders.

SC had ordered to remove all the billboards from public property in the metropolis by June 30 and maintained, earlier in May, that there was no law that permits installing outdoor advertising billboards and signboards on ‘public property’ (which includes roads, sidewalks, islands in the centre of a road, overhead bridges and underpasses, roundabouts, green belts or dividers between a road, and nullahs and their banks).

After the devolution of basic health, education and local taxes departments from the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation (KMC) to the six district municipal corporations (DMCs), the billboards became the latter’s subject.

Where the DMCs seemed to be very active in removing the billboards, the cantonment boards are lagging behind.



South DMC administrator Muhammad Naeem said there were as many as 182 billboards on public properties in the district, of which 170 have been removed and the rest will be removed in the next two days.

Meanwhile, East DMC administrator Rehmatullah Shaikh pointed out that there were 732 billboards in his district, out of which 689 have been removed and the rest will be gone by tomorrow (June 29). Malir DMC administrator Tariq Mughal also gave the same deadline for the removal of illegal billboards within their jurisdiction.

According to Korangi DMC administrator Nisar Somro, they have removed all the 170 illegal billboards.

There are 22 billboards in District West of which 18 were on public property and the illegal ones have been removed, said West DMC administrator Muhammad Iqtedar.

The administrator of Central DMC Aisa Abro was not available for comments despite repeated phone calls. However, Central deputy commissioner Capt(retd) Fariduddin Mustafa said that the removal work was underway. Around 55 billboards have been removed in Cantonment Board Clifton (CBC), informed revenue superintendent Faisal Khan Jadoon. He assured that rest of the hoardings will also be removed soon except for those on private properties at Do Talwar and Teen Talwar.

Cantonment Board Faisal’s (CBF) hoarding in-charge Muhammad Qasim informed that the board has not counted the number of illegal billboards. However, they will remove them by June 30, he said. The removal work has yet to kick off in CBF.

Cantonment Board Malir’s billboard in-charge, Munawar Aleem Rana, said there were 18 billboards on roads in their jurisdiction and they have been removed now.  No official of Cantonment Board Karachi was available for comments.



Who allowed them?

All billboards in the city were erected at the behest of respective municipal agencies, explained Sindh Outdoor Advertisers Association’s general secretary Sajjad Haider. “The municipalities will only face revenue losses, whereas, we had to bear a loss of billions of rupees,” he said, adding that no official of any municipality was punished.

NED University professor of architecture and planning Dr Noman Ahmed also seemed sceptical about the haphazard removal process. The advertisers are allotted a legal documented site for the placement of billboards for a particular time period, he said, adding that the illegal billboards are placed with some sort of ‘hidden’ arrangement with certain officials, he added.

Will they return?

Haider informed that the SC had also ordered to draft a new policy for the placement of the billboards in the city, which will be approved by the apex court.

Ahmed pointed out that with the SC’s decision the existing bylaws for the outdoor signage have become questionable. The advertisers and the municipalities will have to sit together and revisit their bylaws under a steering committee and let those laws approved by the SC, he said. Since there are different bylaws in all cantonments and civic municipalities, Ahmed said that the core content of the bylaws must be same even if schedules differ.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 28^th, 2016.