liquor vendors of the City Beautiful, under the banner of Chandigarh Wine Merchant Association, have expressed their resentment over the proposed amendments in the upcoming ‘excise policy 2015-16’. The Association, opposing the UT Administration’s proposed move to implement old method of auctioning liquor vends in clusters or groups, has submitted a memorandum of their demands to the UT Administrator Kaptan Singh Solanki on Monday.
“Chandigarh Administration is planning to implement the old method of excise policy in Chandigarh which is based on auction of clusters or groups of liquor vends jointly for two-three sectors which was prevalent before 2006-07,” Association president Satya Pal told The Pioneer. He said, “In this system, administration forms a cluster of five to seven liquor vends and then auction these for which huge amount is required for giving bid and to deposit installments, which not only promotes big liquor mafias but also capitalisation of the policy.”
Pal added that on the contrary, in existing excise policy, administration auctions each and every liquor vend at individual level, which provides an opportunity to the petty contractors too to participate in such auctions. He pointed that the Administration had itself replaced the previous cluster system of auctioning of liquor vends due to increasing malpractices of making pools by then big liquor mafias here.
On the other hand, the Administration believed that the unattractive excise policy has kept the takers away. Out of the total 217 liquor vends, last year, only 103 were sold in the first auction in April, and later 23 English liquor vends and 18 Indian made liquor vends find no takers. In the wake of the same, the administration is now mulling over introducing the excise police with little changes.