Kolkata roadside trees are being caught in a recurring pre-puja contest between commercial visibility and urban ecological safety. Along Sahapur Road and Tollygunge Circular Road, several trees were reportedly hacked heavily on one side to improve the visibility of flex banners and hoardings. Environmentalists say the resulting imbalance could make the trees more vulnerable during storms, while the episode also points to a failure to enforce rules that already prohibit advertisements from damaging or trimming trees.
The reported cutting was carried out allegedly by contract labourers engaged by outdoor advertising agencies, according to residents and green activists cited by the Times of India. In several cases, substantial portions of the canopy were removed from one side rather than being pruned evenly. The immediate visual result is a clearer line of sight for advertisements. The urban consequence, environmentalists argue, is a tree whose canopy and supporting structure no longer function in balance.
That distinction matters. The issue is not simply whether a branch has been removed, but why it was removed, who authorised it and whether anyone assessed the tree before or after the work. A roadside tree is part of the public realm, even when it stands beside a privately displayed advertisement. Its canopy affects shade, streetscape quality and the way the tree responds to wind. When commercial structures determine how much of that canopy remains, a private visibility objective begins to shape a public safety asset.
Bonani Kakkar of PUBLIC said indiscriminate cutting for commercial visibility was unacceptable. “You cannot hack a tree according to the convenience of a hoarding,” she said, adding that heavy removal from one side could leave a tree lopsided and vulnerable to wind. She said pruning should be scientific and supervised by people who understand tree architecture.
The concern is structural rather than merely aesthetic. Environmentalist S M Ghosh said the crown and root system operate as a balanced structure and that random cutting disturbs that balance. According to him, when a gust hits the heavier side of a tree, pressure on the trunk and roots can increase sharply. The supplied report does not establish that any particular tree has already become unsafe or that a storm-related failure has occurred. It does, however, document a specific risk identified by environmentalists after one-sided cutting.
This is where the pre-puja timing becomes significant. Temporary advertising expands before the festival season, increasing the commercial value of locations with high traffic and visibility. Trees along busy roads can obstruct a hoarding’s sightline, creating an incentive for agencies or contractors to remove branches rather than alter the advertisement’s location or design. Naba Dutta of Sabuj Mancha described the practice as a recurring pre-puja problem and called for a city-wide protocol preventing private contractors from touching roadside trees without permission and technical supervision.
The reported episode therefore exposes a gap between the formal rules governing advertisements and the street-level process through which those rules are implemented. The Kolkata Municipal Corporation’s 2022 advertising policy states that advertisement structures must not damage, cut or otherwise harm trees. It also says that if a tree is damaged or trimmed to improve the visibility of a hoarding, the advertisement may be removed and the advertiser may be asked to show cause.
KMC’s own website tells advertisers not to trim branches that obstruct advertisements themselves. Instead, they are instructed to approach the parks and squares department. Unauthorised trimming can lead to cancellation of a licence, according to the website guidance cited in the report. These provisions establish three important principles: the advertiser cannot treat a tree as an obstruction under its private control; technical permission is required before any intervention; and the civic body has enforcement powers after damage occurs.
The question raised by the Sahapur Road and Tollygunge Circular Road cases is whether those powers are being used early enough. A rule that allows action only after a tree has been damaged is weaker in practice than a system that checks vulnerable locations before the seasonal advertising rush begins. The report does not say whether KMC inspected the affected stretch, identified the agencies involved or initiated action. That absence is itself relevant to understanding the administrative problem: the rule is clear, but the enforcement trail is not visible in the available account.
The institutional chain is also more complicated than the physical act of cutting. Outdoor advertising agencies may install or manage the hoardings, contract labourers may carry out the pruning, advertisers may benefit from the improved visibility, and the civic body controls advertising permissions and tree-related intervention through different administrative functions. Unless responsibility is linked across that chain, the person who physically cuts a branch may be easier to identify than the commercial entity that gained from the act.
This creates an accountability problem. Bonani Kakkar said that if an agency has damaged trees for better visibility, it should be identified and held accountable. Subhas Datta urged the civic body to inspect the stretch and assess the condition of the affected trees. Their demands focus on the steps required to convert a general prohibition into a functioning enforcement process: identify the damaged trees, establish who carried out the work, determine whether an advertisement benefited from it and apply the available regulatory remedy.
The policy language cited in the report also makes clear that the issue is not a conflict between advertising and greenery without an existing legal framework. KMC has already anticipated the precise behaviour at issue: trimming a tree to make a hoarding more visible. It has prohibited that conduct and provided possible consequences, including removal of the advertisement, a show-cause notice and licence cancellation. The current concern is therefore about compliance and supervision rather than the absence of any rule at all.
A city-wide protocol, as proposed by Naba Dutta, would address the seasonal nature of the problem. The available material does not specify what such a protocol would contain, but the underlying administrative requirement is clear: any pruning request connected to an advertisement must be separated from the commercial agency’s own decision-making. Assessment would need to come from the civic department responsible for trees, with a record of permission, the work undertaken and the condition of the tree afterwards. Without that separation, the same party seeking maximum advertising visibility also controls the decision about how much vegetation is removed.
The case also shows how urban risk can be produced incrementally. No single cut may appear to transform a street. But repeated one-sided removal across multiple trees can alter the visual and structural character of a road. The supplied report describes the practice as common across neighbourhoods, although it does not provide a city-wide count of affected trees, a map of locations, the number of advertisements involved or an assessment of storm-fall incidents linked to such pruning. Those gaps prevent a larger quantitative conclusion, but they also identify what a meaningful civic inspection would need to establish.
For residents, the consequences are experienced at street level. A damaged tree can lose canopy and become visibly asymmetrical. It can also become a source of anxiety during strong winds if its stability has been compromised. The report does not claim that every hacked tree will fall, and that distinction is important. The public-interest concern is that commercial pruning may create or increase a hazard without a technical assessment, while responsibility remains unclear until a problem occurs.
The larger urban question is who gets to modify shared city infrastructure in pursuit of private visibility. Roadside trees are not conventional infrastructure, but they perform public functions and occupy public space. Hoardings, meanwhile, are commercial structures regulated by the civic authority. When the placement or design of one depends on altering the other, the city needs a process that protects the public asset before commercial activity proceeds.
Kolkata’s pre-puja advertising cycle makes that question recurring rather than exceptional. Subhas Datta described the practice as a conflict between commercial advertising and urban greenery, while Naba Dutta warned against allowing it to become an annual ritual. If the same type of cutting appears each year, enforcement limited to individual complaints will not address the pattern. The available evidence supports a narrower conclusion: KMC’s existing rules already provide grounds for intervention, but the reported cases require inspection and accountability to determine whether those rules were breached and what action should follow.
What is established is that trees along two Kolkata roads were reportedly hacked on one side, environmentalists identified potential structural risks, and KMC’s published rules prohibit damage or trimming for hoarding visibility. What remains unestablished in the supplied material is whether the civic body has inspected the trees, which agencies or contractors were responsible, and whether any licences or advertisements have been acted against. Those next steps will determine whether the city’s tree-protection rules operate as enforceable safeguards or remain instructions that are strongest on paper and weakest at the roadside.
