India has this colossal problem of excessive drinking. Unfortunately, one-third of the Indian liquor consumers indulge in hazardous drinking. Such people drink because they want to get drunk. So, hazardous drinking is surely a social problem. There are so many people living below the poverty line, and many of them would like to spend their money on booze when
their families are not even able to have a decent meal. Can we say about these people that it is their business if they want to drink and if their liver goes bust?
There is a warning implicit in statistics which say that you make one rupee from liquor, but you actually spend two rupees on health care. So we can’t say that hazardous drinking is the
business of a person who indulges in it. We too have some social obligations towards the society we live in.
Some people say sharab ki bottle saare gam kharid leti hai (liquor helps you overcome your sorrows). But that’s the cheap way of overcoming your sorrows. Everybody experiences pain
and sorrows. It means all have to drink liquor to dissolve their sorrows. There are so many families that have gone under because of the death of their bread-earners due to drinking.
But prohibition has its own problems. Whenever there is prohibition, illicit liquor or hooch comes into the picture and hooch kills. So there may be a case against prohibition. But if
you drive from Delhi to Chandigarh, you would find signs of so many road accidents on the highway. More than half of these accidents occur because the vehicle driver bought a paoua
from a highway theka (liquor vend), had the drink and did some drunken driving. So actually booze kills.
Is prohibition the answer? Maybe, not. Several states have gone for prohibition, like Gujarat, Haryana, Tamil Nadu, Nagaland, and Andhra Pradesh. Except Gujarat, all reversed
their prohibition. But in Gujarat too, tell the people well-versed with the state, getting liquor is so easy.
We all know liquor contributes 20% of a state’s revenue. Without that 20% Andhra Pradesh was hard-pressed to pay salary to its school teachers during prohibition. Here 20% means only excise, no sales tax, etc. In some states, the liquor revenue accounts for even 25%. And, the loss of liquor revenue accompanying prohibition is one big reason of prohibition’s failure. Just to give an example, Tamil Nadu earns Rs 29000 crore in the form of excise revenue in one year. This huge earning poses a big challenge to us in proposing prohibition.
Will Nitish succeed with prohibition in Bihar? The fact is his state has already seen a couple of hooch tragedies. But women who, fed up with their drunken husbands, voted Nitish to power
on his prohibition promise. Now Nitish can’t go back on his word. But how long Nitish will be able to hold on to prohibition by paying the price of huge revenue loss?
I think prohibition won’t work as it would encourage bootleggers. Then of course you have greedy politician. We all know how the elections are funded. You won’t be able to enter
a state or your brand won’t be passed unless you pay off. The liquor lobby has been funding politicians.
In the context of state revenue loss, the picture becomes clear when we look, for instance, at the ex-distillery price of a bottle of rum which is perhaps cheaper than Coca Cola. The ex-distillery price of a semi-premium whisky happens to be just Rs 40 a bottle. But by the time it hits the market, the bottle sells for 600 bucks. About 70% of this price is tax and maybe 30% the margin. So lots of revenue is riding the liquor business, as India is also the largest consumer of whisky in the world.
So what we should tell Narendra Modi ji – prohibition or no prohibition? I think the path is somewhere in between. We need to encourage certain mode of restriction. We need to see that laws are diligently enforced. Overseas if you are caught driving drunk then your driving licence is suspended for three years.
How about liquor companies spending a certain percentage of their money on de-addiction centres? Let them put the money
there. How about liquor manufacturers giving some kind of
grant to those families whose earning members die because of
excessive drinking? I think liquor companies have some social
obligation. Awareness needs to be spread about the adverse
effects of excessive drinking. Certain restrictions need to be
enforced and tighter laws formulated to regulate drinking. That’s
my recommendation.