The court set a 24-hour deadline for the civic administration to remove
the illegal hoardings in the city and asked the PMC to submit an
action-taken report to it with photographs on March 15 (Friday).

Sources in the civic body said the drive would begin at 8 am in various
parts of the city. The PMC has planned to depute a 20-member team
comprising officers, police personnel, nuisance detection squad members
and helpers. The anti-encroachment department will constitute 15 such
squads so that each ward office has a team.

“A report, along
with photographs of hoardings before and after the removal (of the
hoardings), should be submitted to the anti-encroachment department by 7
pm,” said Ramesh Shelar, deputy commissioner of the PMC’s anti
encroachment department. He added that the administration has already
started removing illegal hoardings across the city and approximately 600
unauthorized hoardings have been taken off.

“The PMC is taking
action against illegal hoardings in the city on a daily basis. The
administration will follow the high court’s directives. All the reports
will be submitted to the court,” PMC commissioner Mahesh Pathak said.

A bunch of public interest litigations pertaining to illegal hoarding
in cities like Mumbai, Thane, Pune, Mira Bhayander and Satara came up
for hearing before the high court bench comprising justices A M
Khanwilkar and A P Bhangale. While hearing the matter, the judges orally
set the deadline for taking action against the illegal hoardings.

“We argued that the PMC has taken strict actions in the recent past
about illegal hoardings. In view of proliferation of such hoardings in
Mumbai and Thane, the bench orally directed officials of all the
corporations and municipal councils present in the court to remove the
illegal hoardings within 24 hours and latest by Thursday evening and
submit an action-taken report on March 15,” advocate Abhijit Kulkarni,
who represented the PMC in the court, told TOI from Mumbai.

“It
also directed the civic officials to take photographs of such hoardings
and issue notices to those whose photographs have appeared on the
hoardings,” he added.

Balasaheb Ganjwe, the president of Pune
Outdoor Hoardings Association, said, “There are almost 1,800 authorized
hoardings in the city and almost an equal number of illegal ones.” He,
however, claimed that the civic administration has not acted swiftly in
removing the illegal hoardings.

In many cases, the civic staff
removed the flex boards instead of hoardings put up across the city, he
said. He added that though the association had given details of illegal
hoardings to the PMC, there has been no satisfactory response from it.