Tamil Nadu - Chennai   

Mega-sized violations of the rules

Karthik Subramanian

Of the city's over 4,500 hoardings, not one is officially licensed It's not just the pilot at the controls on the Boeing who find hoardings distracting.

COUNTER-PRODUCTIVE? Ironically, this hoarding has the effect of taking motorists' attention off the road. — Photo: Shaju John

CHENNAI: Have you seen the latest advertisement hoarding that urges you to pay attention to the road?

The one, you know, with the "Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear" message. It has all the ingredients of a great advertisement: An interesting photo and an equally interesting punch line. A message well put. Makes you want to admire the hoarding really.

Now, here are the questions: When you took some time reading the message, understanding it and admiring it, where was your focus? Was it on the road? If it was not on the road, then was not the graveyard shown in the hoarding closer than it appears?

While pilots suffering from high-powered lamps on the hoardings have the airports authority to represent their problems by taking the issue to the court, road users continue to suffer silently.

Chennai has been the city of hoardings for quite some years now. There are no official figures on exactly how many hoarding are there but even by conservative estimates the number could be over 4,500. Not one of them is officially licensed, as the issue to identify and license them has been pending with the Chennai Collectorate for more than two years now.

Strict rules

The interesting aspect is that even if the government merely takes up the licensing of the hoardings as per the Tamil Nadu Urban Local Bodies Licensing of Hoardings and Levy and Collection of Advertisement Tax Rules, 2003, there would be drastic changes.

The rules set the maximum size of hoardings to 24 feet by 12 feet and prevents hoardings on both sides of the roads that had footpath less than ten feet wide.

Apart from keeping the road user safe on the road, several civil rights groups, including the Citizen Consumer and Civic Action Group, have been saying that restricting the number hoardings could give a new lease of life to the cityscape.

Sources at the Chennai Collectorate said officials are to meet later this week, in the wake of the case at the Madras High Court, and important decisions are likely to be taken.

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