Hyderabad: The GHMC may be slapping fines on a handful of corporators for putting up illegal flexies but there are hordes of others all over the city that the civic body seems to have turned a blind eye to.
In a knee-jerk reaction the civic authorities got unauthorised flexies pulled down from the National Park for speciallyabled at Nalgonda crossroads and the Indoor stadium at Moosarambagh on Friday. Was this done simply to impress municipal administration and urban development minister K.T. Rama Rao?
If not, then the GHMC should not be ignoring the several hundred other unauthorised hoardings that dot the city. According to a civic official, a survey conducted in 2015 revealed that there are 2,620 authorised and 3,000 unauthorised hoardings all over the city. The civic body did remove some of the hoardings and brought the number down to an extent. However, highly placed sources said that there are still over 1,000 unauthorised hoardings that need to be pulled down.
For instance, a poster of Hyderabad police commissioner V.V. Srinivas Rao and South zone DCP V. Satyanarayana was erected in front of Charminar. This significantly blocks the view of the monument. Deputy commissioner N. Ashok Samrat told Deccan Chronicle that the he has instructed officials to remove that particular hoarding. He said a fine will also be imposed on the violators.
Talking on the subject, a senior GHMC official said on condition of anonymity that all hoardings in the city will be geo-tagged and tariff will be fixed, and penalty will be imposed on unauthorised hoardings. He said permissions would be issued online for all hoardings henceforth.
He said that the civic body was planning to upload the data of all hoardings and the private agencies engaged in maintaining them. He said the GHMC will also verify the structural stability certificates before according permission online.
The civic body propose to also assess the size of hoardings with the existing data with special software. Online applications will be automatically rejected if the hoarding erected does not match with the specifications prescribed by the GHMC or flout the structural stability standards. The GHMC hopes to generate an additional '25 crore in revenue annually by regularising unauthorised hoardings, he said.
