West Bengal

Billboard Advertising In West Bengal

West Bengal (/wɛst bɛŋˈɡɔːl/) is an Indian state located in Eastern India on the Bay of Bengal. It is India’s fourth most populous state, with over 91 million inhabitants (as of 2011). It has an area of 88,752 km² (34,267 sq mi). A part of the ethnolinguistic Bengal region, it is bordered by Bangladesh in the east, and Nepal and Bhutan in the north; it shares borders with five Indian states: Odisha, Jharkhand, Bihar, Sikkim, and Assam. The state capital is Kolkata (Calcutta), the seventh-largest city in India. As for geography, West Bengal includes the Darjeeling Himalayan hill region, the Ganges delta, the Rarh region, and the coastal Sundarbans. The main ethnic group is the Bengalis, with Bengali Hindus forming the demographic majority.

In the US, many cities enacted laws banning billboards as early as 1909 (California Supreme Court, Varney & Green vs. Williams) but the First Amendment has made this difficult. A San Diego law championed by Pete Wilson in 1971 cited traffic safety and driver distraction as the reason for the billboard ban but was narrowly overturned by the Supreme Court in 1981, in part because it banned non-commercial as well as commercial billboards.