Friday, April 27, 2007

Hoardings - Highway to hell



I am sure everyone of us at some point or the other got distracted to a gigantic poster of a beautiful girl or car or something more interesting (I am not sure what could be more interesting to a man). Yeah... you might ask what is bad in admiring a good advertisement or something creative?

when you are driving in Hyderabad you will be busy searching for any amount of space you get to shove in your vehicle so that you can reach your destination quicker. At the same time you should be careful to avoid autos and public transport buses which stop wherever they like and move from one corner of the road to other as if they are the only ones on the road. Also avoiding open manholes, pits dug out by telephone/water department, broken road dividers, construction going on in between and beside the roads, people walking/crossing the lanes, stray animals on the road.

Just imagine at this point if you come across a beautiful over sized hoarding to which your eyes cannot resist and you just want to glance at it for some more time but you cannot. I am not sure of you but I was in this situation many times. Especially now a days these advertisements are getting so creative that one has to analyze it to understand it, and in the position one will be, it is impossible to do so.

Where driving on such roads in such difficult conditions is a Herculean task, I cannot even imagine what could happen if we lose concentration of a fraction of a second or if our thoughts wander off the road.

But recently new kind of threat came up, one of these gigantic single pole structure came down crashing killing one and causing a lot of damage to property and people. And I have also herd of many such similar structures bent or deformed due to the heavy winds.

Can't Government think for the safety of a common man before giving permissions to such structures? Does it check the quality of the structure before it is put up?. I am not sure.

One thing I know is the contractors who put up these hoardings are filling their pockets big time.
Worse thing happening these days is there are large TV's displayed at junctions which play Advertisements. Imagine if a static picture can be of such diversion how much a motion picture is? These days Government is constructing Walkways on busy roads to cross from one side of the road to another, and even on these huge hoardings keep hanging (On my way to office I cannot resist to see a huge LCD TV advertisement on one of these).

Is Government/Corporation not concerned about the safety of people? Does it only look at the amount of revenue it gets by giving permissions to such hoardings? Is there anyone who can check these? Cant we do anything about it? If you people know any way please let us do something!!

1 comment:

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