‘We are Angry’

After spending hours cleaning up the filthy section near the Keyes High School (Secunderabad), Hyderabad Beats, a spot-fixing group from the city, were in for a rude surprise. Within a week, the neat red walls were plastered with dozens of party posters.

The main aim of Hyderabad Beats, the forum of 45 students and working professionals from the city, is to rid the city of the “garbage dump in your neighbourhood” or “illegal speed breakers that are very annoying and are mostly ignored”. But seeing how their work is not being valued, they have decided to take a break.

“It’s annoying and demoralising when you are faced with such a situation,” says a disappointed Aravind B., entrepreneur and founding member of Hyderabad Beats.
Of the 10 spots they have cleaned and maintained in the past six months, four have been defaced. “One of the first areas that we cleaned up was the Lingampally bus-stop; it was in a terrible condition — posters stuck on the walls and garbage everywhere. That took us a while to clean. But now, we are back to square one,” says Aravind, adding, “So rather than cleaning up more spots, we are taking a break to decide on how to tackle this menace.”

The forum does have a supervising team, one that keeps tab on the spots it had worked on. “If we would see a poster stuck here or there, we would remove it overnight. Or we would call up the companies advertised on the posters and tell them that we would file a police complaint,” says Aravind.

But when faced with political posters, as in the case of the Keyes High School spot, the group is stumped. “We are planning a campaign for a ‘poster free city’ that will take care of such problems.”