BENGALURU: The way to regain Bengaluru’s lost beauty has been cleared. The advertising agencies will now have to remove all the empty structures which earlier held illegal hoardings across the city. The empty structures left standing presented an ugly picture.The Karnataka High Court on Tuesday vacated the interim order restraining the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) from taking action against advertising agencies which have left their empty structures standing.
The interim order, passed by a single bench, had asked BBMP not to act further against the petitioners’ advertisement structures/hoardings in private properties. Before vacating the interim order, Justice Vineet Kothari said the advertisement agencies had to fully pay the price for the mess created by them in the city.
The court observed: “How can there be a mirror without a frame?” The structures of hoardings have to go too, the court said, adding that in the larger public interest, it had taken a stand to ask the BBMP to implement the law to curb unauthorised hoardings/structures/flexes in the city.
“We will not go against it. We know fully what is happening and there should be no advertisements or structures too. Forget advertisements in Bengaluru for the time being. You have created this mess, you have to pay the price for this, so pay the price fully,” the court observed.
The order was passed after hearing the petitions filed by some of the advertisement agencies challenging BBMP’s resolution banning all kinds of outdoor advertisements in the city.The court asked the registry to post all the petitions challenging the ban of advertisements before the division bench headed by Chief Justice Dinesh Maheshwari, which is hearing a batch of public interest litigations seeking directions to remove all unauthorised flexes/banners/hoardings across city.
While hearing the batch of petitions, the single bench had asked the BBMP not to take any precipitative action against batch of advertisers who had moved the court against the BBMP’s resolution banning outdoor advertisements for one year.
The petitions were filed by the Pacific Advertising and others. They have contended that they had installed the iron structures and displayed hoardings after obtaining permission from the BBMP.The petitioners had claimed that the BBMP cannot take a decision to impose blanket ban n ads as the bylaws framed in 2006 for regulating non-commercial advertisements were still in force.The BBMP on August 6 banned all kinds of outdoor advertisements for one year. Thereafter, the BBMP issued a notice dated August 27 to them saying the structures they had erected were illegal as they had not obtained permission.