People are fed up of political posters defacing the skyline of the city. Aware of the needed permissions to put up banners that often slyly skipped by parties, some activists are sending photos of the hoardings through cVIGIL application launched by Election Commission of India.
cVIGIL app allows people to record any violation of the code of conduct and send it to the relevant authority for appropriate action. Taking an action on two such banners in the city, a banner featuring CM Kamal Nath and another featuring sports and youth welfare minister Jitu Patwari were removed from Bhandari Bridge and in front of Collectorate office respectively.
The city continues to be covered in promotional flex banners that bug people.
One such activist, who is continuously sending complaints about banners that have not taken permission, is Sanjay Mishra. Raising a complaint against the hoardings, he sent geo-location enabled photos to through the app to the commission. “The entire city is filled with posters and many of these posters do not have permission from the commission,” Mishra said. He added that promotion using hoardings is negatively affecting the city.
“We are talking about cleanest city of India, we should maintain cleanliness and reduce the use of flex banners that are non-biodegradable,” Mishra said. According to a study conducted by ICRA last year, 90% of all of all advertising in the country is on PVC and around 18,000 tons of PVC flex banners are consumed every month. “We need to understand that our actions have consequences, ideally it would be better to switch over from flex banners to fabric,” environmentalist Rajendra Singh said.
He added that political parties and government need to set a good example. “Election commission probably considers all the aspects and then gives permission, our political parties are setting a bad example by putting up banners without permission,” Singh said.
72% complaints found to be correct
Over 720 complaints have been received from people through the cVigil app by the office of Chief Electoral Officer here and 72 per cent of those were found to be correct, the Delhi CEO Ranbir Singh had mentioned in an event. The Election Commission last year had launched an Android-based app – cVigil, using which a person can send to it geo-tagged videos and photos of illegal money being distributed or a hate speech being made during polls. Till date Delhi has 1.41 crore registered voters which include 77.5 lakh male voters and 63.5 lakh female voters. The gender ratio of electors registered is about 812 women voters per 1000 of male voters, he said.0s
