Operation to be conducted on daily basis
The Karachi metropolitan corporation’s anti-encroachment department has started tripping sign-boards, hoardings, and banners from the central and east Distrct.
The operation, which will be con-ducted on a dai9ly basis, is being led by KMC senior director Bashir Siddiqui. On Saturday, advertisements in new Karachi, Nazimabad, north Nazimabad, Gulber and north Karachi were removed.
In the east, KMC teams removed advertisement boards from poles, ser-vice roads, footpaths and bridges in Gulshan-E-Iqbal Shahrah-E-Faisal, Sindhi Muslim, and Shahrah-E-Qaideen.
The development comes after kmc metropolitan commissioner Afzal Zaidi issued a letter earlier this week. he has instructed all district municipal corpo-rations to remove advertisement signboards, stream-ers, and Panaflex from main roads, greenbelts and poles. All these properties belong to the KMC, Zaidi stressed.
Earlier, in September 2019, council members of the corporation passed a resolution demanding the removal of advertisement boards.
In 2014, there were over 3,000 bill-boards in Karachi with 140 on the strip from hotel Metropole in Gora Qabristan on Shahrah-e-Faisal that earned the cantonment at least Rs 250 million a year. It is a lucrative business.
But ever since the supreme court’s crackdown in2015, advertisers got creative and started using walls, billboard sites are auctioned by KMC and cantonments for year con-tracts. advertisers erect bill boards and then marketing companies rent them.
