The Hindu Business Line : Ban on hoardings comes as ‘massive blow’ to industry

Chennai, April 15 The Tamil Nadu Government’s drive to remove hoardings is a “massive blow” to the 40-year-old industry, causing a Rs 100-crore loss and leaving lakhs of people jobless.

“It’s a massive blow to all of us in the industry including vinyl printers, painters, media agencies and fabricators. The drive has negated over 1.5 lakh jobs in the State,” says Mr K. Chandrasekaran, President, Tamil Nadu Private Site Hoardings Owners’ Association.

The Association notes that this will not only affect the industry, but will also cause a loss of revenue to the Government — the hoarding owners have been collectively paying at least Rs 20 crore a year as service tax. Further, the State is getting another Rs 5 crore as sales tax from vinyl printers.

The Government would get around Rs 40 crore as corporation taxes, if it regularised the industry and let the hoardings continue, says Mr P. Suresh, Secretary of the association.

He contends that the authorities concerned “did not follow any formalities prescribed by the law and arbitrarily removed all the hoardings”, including those in private sites. According to him, hoarding owners were not served any show-cause notice before hoardings were brought down.

“Even now they have not issued any notice or letter to many of us,” he says. The members of this association have scaffoldings in private places — on top of private buildings and inside compound walls of private sites. There were about 6,000 hoardings in private sites across the State, “and more than 4,000 of them have been brought down till now,” he said on Monday. “The authorities did not even give us enough time to pull them down. They cut most of the scaffoldings and carried away all those expensive light fittings,” he said.

According to industry sources the size of the hoardings business would be in the region of Rs 200 crore in the State. Advertisers are charged at Rs 20-40 a sq ft a month depending upon the location, visibility and size of the hoarding. Going by this, a 3,000-sq ft hoarding at a prominent place would fetch the owner over Rs 1 lakh a month.

“Though we are prepared to abide by rules that are in place, the Government did not even consider our applications for obtaining licence. Till date, not one hoarding in the State is licensed,” says Mr K. Pandia Rajan, Vice-President of the association. He argues that the State should have regularised the industry instead of imposing a blanket ban on hoardings.

The association now seeks the Chief Minister’s interference and has also sought an appointment to meet him with a three-point agenda — 1) to frame proper guidelines for hoardings in private places; 2) to allow a maximum size of 24’X12’ hoardings irrespective of road width and 3) to relax location-wise restrictions such as road junctions.

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