All bars in Kerala except those at the 24 five-star hotels and 33 elites’ clubs have gone out of operation following a March 31 order of the High Court upholding the Government’s liquor policy aiming to create a booze-free Kerala in phases but that seems to have failed to have any immediate impact on the boozing habit if the sales at retail booze outlets are any indication.
On April 2, the first working day for liquor business in the new financial year, booze worth Rs38.37 crore was sold through the retail outlets of Kerala State Beverages Corporation (KSBC), the State-run monopoly booze distributor, while liquor sold on March 2, when 324 bars were in operation, was worth only Rs30.6 crore.
Even if the five-percent increase in the Excise duty imposed on liquor in the new financial year is taken into consideration, the sales on April 2 show a 22 per cent leap. Sale of liquor on the particular day in comparison to March 2 at the 39 retail shops of the Kerala State Cooperative Consumer Federation (ConsumerFed) had also registered an increase of ten percent.
Sources in KSBC and ConsumerFed said that the trend of increased liquor sales at their outlets had been continuing since April 2. They said all retail shops had been witnessing a huge increase in the number of customers and the rush had been so heavy since April 2 that several of the shops had to depend on police to regulate queues.
Anti-liquor activists admit that the increase in liquor sales and the swell in customers’ rush at retail outlets prove that the closure of the 300 bars have had almost no effect on the boozing tendency of the Keralites but they hoped that things would improve in the coming weeks or months.
There are more reasons for the critics of the Government’s liquor policy to argue that the closure of bars in the name of step-by-step Prohibition has not had the desired effect. There has been a huge increase in the number of Keralites visiting the bars in the border areas of Tamil Nadu and Karnataka and in the Mahe enclave of Pondicherry since the closure of bars in Kerala, they say.
Employees of a bar in a Tamil Nadu village some four kilometers away from the inter-state border check-post at Aryankavu, Kollam said that there had been a 25 per cent increase in the liquor sales in their bar since the closure of Kerala bars. “Many Keralites are coming here now. On Saturday, we had to arrange additional seats for them,” said a bar employee.
Reports from Tamil Nadu’s Coimbatore district bordering Kerala say that many bars there are competing among themselves to attract boozers from Kerala. “Many of them come here, start boozing right from the morning till late in the evening and return by night. They come in own vehicles and even by train,” said the manager of a bar in Coimbatore.
At the same time, the flow of Kerala boozers into Mahe, an enclave of Pondicherry trapped in Kerala territory between Vadakara and Thalassery, has become a social problem for the people there. Mahe, having a history of French rule, has close to 100 liquor outlets including bars in both the authorized and unauthorized sector.
“There are people coming here even from Thrissur, 200 KM away, who stay here for several days just for boozing. Mahe is as small as a panchayat and the scores of boozed people wandering here on our streets are a huge nuisance to us. At times, it is even becoming a security problem for our girls,” said Meherunnisa, a resident of Mahe.