Bihar’s dry spell: Booze in bags, smoke in streets
The impact of prohibition on social and economic life in Bihar is likely to be an electoral issue as the State inches closer to Assembly polls early next month. Unemployment and animosity against residents of Bihar in some States have hooked the younger generations to mobile data and dry intoxicants or sookha nasha substances such as ganja, cocaine, heroin and other psychotropic substances. Intoxicants are available even in the remotest villages of underdeveloped districts, such as Saharsa, Madhubani, and Purnea, to name a few.
Bihar enforced liquor ban in April 2016. However, branded alcohol is available everywhere in the State within 30 minutes. All brands are smuggled from neighbouring Nepal, Assam, West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh and Jharkhand.
Addiction has even children and women in its grip in Bihar. Alcohol is supplied by women or by kids using school bags for RS 100-`200 as a delivery charge, as there can be no needle of suspicion on them. Despite prohibition, the State has faced a number of hooch tragedies, including even Chief Minister Nitish Kumar’s home district of Nalanda.
Those who cannot afford smuggled expensive liquor or drugs get intoxicated by using cheaper alternatives such as cough syrups and volatile solvents, nail polish remover, shoe lotions, thinner, diluter, among others. Sources in the Bihar Government say that a separate task force unit was constituted a few days ago to tackle illicit trade and smuggling of narcotic and psychotropic substances.
Additional Director General of Police (Headquarters) Kundan Krishnan, Bihar police, told The Pioneer that the police have merged the domains of prohibition and narcotics units into a single State-wide task force. The other two States, which have a separate unit to tackle the menace, are in Punjab and Haryana.
“Soon stations will be established in order to carry out coordinated action against illicit trade and drug abuse. The move is aimed at dismantling drug networks systematically. Only arrests will not work. We need a strong framework and capable team to break the nexus,” Krishnan said, adding the new team will map forward and backward linkages in the supply chain with a focus on wholesalers.
Mahendra Mahto, a resident of Rajiv Nagar in Patna, expressed dismay over the precarious situation affecting the majority of households in the State. “Sookah nasha ghus chuka hai. Sharab bund ho gaya lekin youth tarah tarah ke drugs le rahe hain. Yahan har varg ke log ko inka naam bhi pata ho gaya jo Bihar mein jaanta bhi nahi tha. Sarkarein soyi hai,” Mahendra said, who had no regret in sharing that both his teenage sons are violent drug addicts.
“Media is fixated only on unemployment, vote chori, petty politics. But what is worrying the older generations in the State is this sukha nasha penetrated deeply in villages, rural areas, towns and cities amongst and youths, particularly teenagers, college students, and daily wagers. Domestic violence has gone up, which was unheard of in states like Bihar and all this is due to this kind of addiction,” said Suryakant Pathak, a villager of Satarwar in Saharsa.
