PCMC defends delayed action, says hoardings to be put under scanner
As PCMC started taking action against illegal hoardings, the Pimpri-Chinchwad Outdoor Advertising Association moved the Bombay High Court and got a stay on the civic action.
At the accident spot in Kiwale where five people died due to the hoarding collapse. (Express photo by Rajesh Stephan)
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IN the wake of the death of five persons when a hoarding collapsed in Kiwale area of Pimpri-Chinchwad on Monday, it has emerged that the civic administration of Pimpri-Chinchwad Municipal Corporation had at first turned a blind eye to illegal hoardings when they were being set up, and then the administration took its own sweet time to decide upon razing them.
As PCMC started taking action against illegal hoardings, the Pimpri-Chinchwad Outdoor Advertising Association moved the Bombay High Court and got a stay on the civic action.
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It was in March 2021 that PCMC first issued notices to those who had mounted hoardings without civic permission for getting their structures regularised. A lack of response propelled the civic body to survey illegal hoardings in September 2021. It also asked those who set up the illegal hoardings to have them regularised from the civic body. PCMC found as many as 434 hoardings, in all shapes and sizes, had been mounted across the industrial city without its permission, civic officials who worked in the Sky Sign and Licence department of PCMC told The Indian Express.
A day after the tragedy, the civic administration had a hard time replying to journalists’ queries about how illegal hoardings were mounted brazenly and why no decisive and quick action was taken against them.
Defending the civic administration, Municipal Commissioner Shekhar Singh, told the press at PCMC headquarters in Pimpri, that the illegal hoardings were to be razed in April 2022. “However, in the same month, the Pimpri-Chinchwad Outdoor Advertising Association got a stay from the high court on civic action. Subsequently, the court, too, extended the stay,” he said.
Singh said that in April 2022, during the tenure of Municipal Commissioner Rajesh Patil, the civic administration had served a notice to contractors and land owners where the illegal hoardings had been mounted. “After the given three days, we took down 127 illegal hoardings from April 1 to April 13, 2022. But we had to stop when the HC asked us to maintain a status quo in the matter.”
From April 2022 to April 2023, the 434 illegal structures stayed put, with the matter remaining sub-judice. “We will now bring the tragedy to the high court’s notice, so we can take the process further,” the PCMC chief said.
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Asked as to when the illegal hoarding in Kiwale was set up, the PCMC chief said he would find out. “It is not that we took no action. It is a continuous process. In this particular case, we could not take action after the high court’s stay order.”
Following the tragedy, the PCMC administration said it would take a hard look at the existing authorised hoardings to ensure that such accidents do not occur again. The industrial city has 1,344 authorised structures. “We will conduct a re-assessment and verification, and the existing hoardings will be checked for structural stability and get approval from certified engineers. Our engineering wing and COEP will conduct a study to take into account the different aspects of hoardings like structural audit, size, colour, IRC code. We want to ensure an ideal and standardised hoarding in tune with the state government hoarding policy which was released last year,” he said. The civic administration said that in the last fiscal not a single hoarding was given permission. “We wanted to ensure that hoardings were aesthetically appealing and did not cause visual clutter. And when it emerged that there were large-scale illegal hoardings, we did not give permission to new hoarding,” the civic administration said.
Manoj More has been working with the Indian Express since 1992. For the first 16 years, he worked on the desk, edited stories, made pages, wrote special stories and handled The Indian Express edition. In 31 years of his career, he has regularly written stories on a range of topics, primarily on civic issues like state of roads, choked drains, garbage problems, inadequate transport facilities and the like. He has also written aggressively on local gondaism. He has primarily written civic stories from Pimpri-Chinchwad, Khadki, Maval and some parts of Pune. He has also covered stories from Kolhapur, Satara, Solapur, Sangli, Ahmednagar and Latur. He has had maximum impact stories from Pimpri-Chinchwad industrial city which he has covered extensively for the last three decades.
Manoj More has written over 20,000 stories. 10,000 of which are byline stories. Most of the stories pertain to civic issues and political ones. The biggest achievement of his career is getting a nearly two kilometre road done on Pune-Mumbai highway in Khadki in 2006. He wrote stories on the state of roads since 1997. In 10 years, nearly 200 two-wheeler riders had died in accidents due to the pathetic state of the road. The local cantonment board could not get the road redone as it lacked funds. The then PMC commissioner Pravin Pardeshi took the initiative, went out of his way and made the Khadki road by spending Rs 23 crore from JNNURM Funds. In the next 10 years after the road was made by the PMC, less than 10 citizens had died, effectively saving more than 100 lives.
Manoj More's campaign against tree cutting on Pune-Mumbai highway in 1999 and Pune-Nashik highway in 2004 saved 2000 trees.
During Covid, over 50 doctors were asked to pay Rs 30 lakh each for getting a job with PCMC. The PCMC administration alerted Manoj More who did a story on the subject, asking then corporators how much money they demanded....The story worked as doctors got the job without paying a single paisa.
Manoj More has also covered the "Latur drought" situation in 2015 when a "Latur water train" created quite a buzz in Maharashtra. He also covered the Malin tragedy where over 150 villagers had died.
Manoj More is on Facebook with 4.9k followers (Manoj More), on twitter manojmore91982 ... Read More
