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The battle for the bottle
 The Tamil Nadu government has promulagated an ordinance entrusting retail sale of Indian-made foreign liquor (IMFL) to the state-owned Tamil Nadu State Marketing Corporation and cooperative societies.
The main advantage of the government's decision to sell IMFL on its own is that it would fetch a higher revenue as most of the private operators had been selling spurious liquor, as they fetch higher margins, instead of government stock. As the government has directly taken control of the sales of liquor, the consumers can, hereafter, get quality stuff and not fear that what they drink is not what they paid for.
This ordinance would, no doubt, send shock waves also among the policemen and Excise officials - apart from the liquor shop owners who had moved the court against the move.
In major cities, a wine shop would fetch a monthly 'mamool' of Rs 4,000 for the local police station and double the amount for the Excise officials in order to turn a blind eye to the illegal activities of these traders and to avoid surprise checks. There are at least 10 to 15 wine shops in a police station limit and we can imagine the size of mamool each police station was raking in.
 The decision to permit cooperatives in the liquor trade would put an end to the collection of this mamool by the police and Excise officials.
Even after the government had permitted bars, the private traders had allowed the customers to drink liquor out in the open, causing inconvenience to the general public, especially women. Such public nuisance could become a thing of the past as the cooperative stores would never allow such blatant violations.
Even though the government has given instructions that wine shops should not be kept open after 10 p.m., most of the shops remain opened long past that with the connivance of the police. Even during Gandhi Jayanthi, a day in which all wine shops are expected to be closed, these operators sell on the sly. We can expect that the closure time would be strictly adhered to in these government-run shops without any violations.
Another glaring violation was in these private operators fixing the prices arbitrarily: The prices varied from shop to shop with the traders charging higher than the government prices in some places. The prices would not only remain the same but would also be stable in the cooperative liquor shops.
Most of the liquor shops are run by gangsters, rowdies or locally influential politicians with the enormous ill-gotten money of the gangsters. With these gangsters and rowdy elements getting out of this trade, we can expect life to be a little more easy for the ordinary citizen.
The only disturbing feature of this sudden government decision is that thousands of persons employed in these private shops would become jobless. Even though the government may argue that it would give employment to these people in the new shops, there is a rumour that only ruling partymen would be
favoured.
The challange before the government is that these gangsters and the locally-influential politicians, deprived of their huge income, would not remain mute spectators. Since they have mastered the art of producing spurious liquor, they may move on to the illicit liquor trade on a large scale, in their fiefdoms.
The police, deprived of their regular mamool, may connive with them and conveniently violate the probibition rules to get back their booty.
The government, for sure, has on its hands a mini-war in fighting illicit liquor.
Harvey
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