liquor vends in rural Andhra Pradesh, known as belt shops will be closed down soon as Chief Minister N Kiran Kumar Reddy has decided to crack down on the illegal shops.
Though the Government does not have any official figure of how many such shops were being run in the villages and hamlets across the State, women’s organisations and the NGOs campaigning against the mushrooming shops say that there were at least 200,000 such outlets posing a grave threat to the rural economy as well social fabric of the villages.
With the Government turning blind eye to rampant illegal trade of liquor, the number of such shops has seen sharp rise over the last few years. While the Government insisted that it had allowed only 5,980 liquor shops, the licence-holders in turn had opened smaller outlets in the rural areas around their shops to compensate for the huge licence fee they had paid to the Government.
Social activists fighting against these illegal shops alleged that a nexus between politicians, police and other Government officials and the liquor traders was at work behind this burgeoning liquor trade.
Chief Minister N Kiran Kumar Reddy, who had to give a public commitment at a meeting in Eluru town of West Godavari district at the behest of Union Minister for Rural Development Jairam Ramesh, convened a meeting of the officials of Excise and Prohibition Department and sought a detailed report on the belt shops. He asked them to submit a report within a month to enable the Government to act against these shops.
Ever since total prohibition was lifted in Andhra Pradesh in 1996, cheap liquor known as arrack is banned in the State and only Indian-made foreign liquor was allowed through limited outlets. But over the years, the number of such outlets was increased as liquor became the major source of revenue of the State Government.
The State Government is earning a revenue of Rs21,000 crore (more than four billion dollars) from liquor trade through licence fee, excise tax etc.