Death flows from the bottle

If anything, the Sewrahi tragedy brought to the fore the government apathy. The insensitity of the Kalyan Singh government towards the worst such tragedy in recent memory can be gauged by the fact that no minister of the jumbo cabinet could spare time to visit the relatives of the dead or those who lost their eyesight.

Kalyan Singh and other ministers were busy with the BJP conclave at Gandhinagarwhile victims with complaints of failing eyesight continued to pour into the Medical College at Gorakhpur and other nearby hospitals.

For the record, Kalyan Singh skirted the party’s National Executive Committee meeting in New Delhi last month to participate in the Kshtriya Sammelan at Lucknow. A Commissioner-level inquiry was ordered by the Government four days after the incident and that was all the government could do.

Will a few suspensions and an inquiry solve the problem?

A nexus of politicians, police, excise officials and bootleggers has spread its tentacles in majority of the districts and cheap illicit liquor is available in abundance almost everywhere. In Sewrahi, the illicit liquor was being manufactured near the local police.

The Government has not yet shown the courage to break the nexus though liquor continues to be one of its major sources of revenue. In fact, the Government’s insistence on hiking the rates of auction of liquor shops has also indirectly contributed to the brisk saleof illicit liquor.

This year, the Government increased the revenue through the auction of liquor vends by 20 to 25 per cent. The auction in many districts was to be postponed because the bidders were not willing to go for such high prices. Though they agreed later, they are bound to cover their losses through mindless hike in prices of country and Indian made foreign liquor (IMFL), thus boosting the sale of illicit liquor at lower prices.

While liquor vends in the state were auctioned for Rs 110.50 crore last year, this year the Government earned more than Rs 130 crore. NRevenue through the Excise Department is the main source of Government’s income, raking in approximately 21 per cent of the total revenue.

However, it remains an irony that though liquor fetches such revenue to the Government, it makes no efforts to ensure its purity and leaves everything to liquor barons who have formed syndicates and fix prices of both varieties of liquor on their own.

A 200-gm country liquor pouch costs Rs 25elsewhere but in Sewrahi a glass of liquor was available at Rs two with a discount of Re one if three glasses were taken at a time. Illicit liquor breweries are producing barrels of liquor everyday and most of them are situated in Unnao and almost all the districts in Eastern Uttar Pradesh. As many as 120 people have died after consuming illicit liquor in Uttar Pradesh during the last six months. More than 20 people died in Bareilly last month while five persons died in Varansi and deaths are still being reported from Kushinagar district.Similar deaths have been reported from Basti, Gorakhpur and Kanpur districts during the last six months.

The worst hooch tragedy in Uttar Pradesh occurred in Ghaziabad in 1991 in which more than 200 persons lost their lives after consuming an adulterated ayurvedic medicine which substituted for liquor.

Though the number of liquor-related deaths has been on the rise, the state machinery has been more or less inactive. “We cannot do anything in checking the sale of illicitliquor or maintaining quality in auctioned shops because the Excise Department is a toothless tiger,” said a senior official with the Excise Department.