While the PMC has started a crackdown against the commercial hoardings that are beyond a stipulated size and within the 25-metre periphery of a chowk, the railway authorities allege that doing so will hurt them by as much as Rs 50-70 lakh per year, given that almost 80 per cent of the CR commercial revenue comes from leasing out space for such hoardings. Currently, the CR earns a few crores of rupees from this avenue.

A major portion of the bread and butter for CR still comes from leasing out of the hoarding space at prime locations belonging to the CR and some of the prime locations in the city are Juna Bazaar chowk, Maldhakka chowk and Shivajinagar railway station.

"The leased out the railway properties in prime locations generate good revenue from advertisers. For over a year, the PMC has been asking us to remove these hoardings and place them beyond the 25-metre limit citing a state government order," said Ashok Malhotra, senior divisional commercial manager of Pune division of CR. At the same time the PMC is going soft on political banners and hoardings, he alleged.

The PMC has no defense. “Despite the regular drives, these political hoardings come up again immediately. The action will really get stringent when the Multi Purpose Squad (MPS) falls in place, which has a responsibility, among other things, of stopping the defacement of city done through such unauthorised banners and posters,” said Vivek Kharwadkar, PMC additional city engineer (road).

"As per the government order, the PMC asked us to reduce the sizes of the hoardings- with the upper limit being 40 ft X 20 ft, which we have started following. But this reduction is taking a major toll on our business," said a railway officer.

Malhotra has another complaint: "The PMC has stopped issuing the sky-sign licenses to our new clients. Not only are we unable to float tenders for the existing sites, but we are compelled to stick to the old clients, at rates far lower than what we can potentially earn," he said.

This in turn has pushed the CR to try and tap new possibilities of commercial revenue generation like advertising through plasma TVs at railway stations and leasing out external space of trains for advertisements.