BMC mulls tough norms for hoardings

It was only after an eight -year-old lost his life that the municipal corporation has realised the dangers of hoardings placed on the city's 33,000 lamp posts. The corporation now plans to implement tougher norms for hoardings on lamp posts such as increasing the distance between the road and hoarding and specify what material it should be made of.

"After the Viraj Parmar's incident, it became necessary to consider changes in the specifications for hoardings, especially those put up on lamp posts," said Mohan Adtani, additional municipal commissioner. On November 23, Parmar, a Class 3 student of Sardar Vallabh Ashram English Medium School in Sion, stuck his head out of the school bus window to wave goodbye to his friends. His head hit against hoarding hanging precariously on a lamp post.

The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) mandates that hoardings on lamp posts be placed at a height of above 8ft so that they do not hit pedestrians. But, it does not specify the distance to be maintained between the road and hoarding.

The BMC plans to ensure that there should be at least 3 ft distance between the road and advertisements on lamp posts. "We will demand that the advertisements be on flex or cloth and its frame made of light material not metal," said Adtani.

The BMC should have a uniform policy for hoardings, said Rajhans Singh, opposition leader in BMC. "We never see the BMC pull down commercial hoardings. They always target the political ones." BJP corporator Ashish Shelar said that even parties pay the BMC for putting up hoardings. "Why target only political hoardings?"he asked.

One of the reasons could be that the BMC earns around Rs400 crore a year from commercial hoardings.  Now, the BMC has decided to charge the same fee for all kinds of hoardings, said an official from the licence department.

Mr KC Venugopal minister of state for power informed the Lok Sabha that the Bachat Lamp Yojana scheme aims to distribute the Compact Fluorescent Lamps to the households at a price equivalent to the price of the conventional incandescent Lamp ie INR 15 per lamp.

Three types of ICL lamp wattages commonly in use viz. 40W, 60W and 100W are likely to be replaced by the CFL wattages of 9-10W, 12-15W and 20-23W respectively under the BLY scheme. The BLY scheme upon implementation would result in reducing:

1. 6000 MW of electricity generation capacity translating into a potential saving of INR 24000 crores per annum.

2. Combined Green House Gases emission savings of 20 million tonnes of CO2 (Carbon Dioxide) from grid connected power plants.

The CFL distribution has been undertaken in Kerala and few parts of Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Himachal Pradesh and Maharashtra.

Assam has issued a tender to select the project implementor for Bachat Lamp Yojana and Tripura is negotiating with the project implementors for BLY implementation in the state.