34 highlights
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The far side of the ditch is Telangana, where liquor is legal. The near side is Andhra Pradesh, which announced a prohibition law in October 2019.
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In practice, however, the State needs the hefty tax revenue brought in by liquor manufacturing and sales. So complete prohibition is in force in only four states and one union territory: Gujarat, Bihar, Nagaland, Mizoram and Lakshadweep.
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The Constitution left it to Indian states to legislate on liquor. Consequently, the various wings of government are often torn between the moral imperative, public health considerations––and the need to finance their own survival.
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At the Communist Party of India’s office in Visakhapatnam, pictures of Bhagat Singh and Lenin gaze down from the walls, and stacks of a new Telugu translation of The Communist Manifesto teeter in a corner of the room. Here, a group of activists gather to describe the long battle fought by working-class women to arrest the spread of liquor shops in Andhra Pradesh.
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From 1920s America to present-day India, women have been a driving collective force in prohibition movements.
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A widow named Vardhineni Rosamma—who was later popularly called Dubagunta Rosamma—and thousands of other women joined a state-run adult literacy programme in the early 1990s. One of the booklets they read was “Seetha Katha.” It was about a woman who commits suicide after her efforts to reform her alcoholic husband fail. The tale hit close to home.
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In 1991, Rosamma and a group of women marched to the local arrack shop where they prevailed on the owner to close it down.
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NTR’s government encouraged alcohol production and consumption under a programme called Varuna Vahini, which translates to ‘flood of liquor.’ Arrack came to be available in small plastic sachets, rather than inconvenient bottles and pots. It was home-delivered. Labourers were even paid in tokens that could be exchanged for these sachets.
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In the decade leading up to 1991, tax revenue from arrack increased four-fold, from ₹150 crore to ₹630 crore. Andhra Pradesh topped the country in arrack consumption.
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Then came the women’s movement. The Andhra government responded to its demands and officially banned arrack sales in 1993. But protests continued, because palm wine––kallu, or toddy––and Indian Made Foreign Liquor (IMFL), had replaced arrack in the lives of the menfolk.
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According to a report in The Lancet, consumption increased by almost 40% in the period between 2010-2017. Men comprise 95% of drinkers. The 2019-2020 National Family Health Survey also suggests that in five states—including Andhra—30% or more of Indian women face some form of abuse from their husbands. Many women draw a direct line from alcohol to rampant abuse.
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Governments and manufacturers have often taken advantage of the price inelasticity of liquor. “If a meal were to cost more than ₹20 per plate, no one would buy it. But even if liquor is ₹500 a bottle, people will keep buying,” Santosh said.
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According to a 2019 report of the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, it is neither the state with the highest prevalence of alcohol use (Chhattisgarh at 35.6%) nor the one with the highest number of total drinkers (Uttar Pradesh with 4.2 crore). But the dependency rate amongst users in Andhra Pradesh is a staggering 43.5%. The national average is 18.5%.
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From 2005-12, liquor licences were distributed through an auction system. There would be around 48,000 bids for about 6,500 shop licences. Bidders would often quote wild figures, he told me. Some paid as much as ₹5 crore and then found themselves in a bind: could they make enough sales to justify the investment?
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“To break even,” the official said, “they would resort to all kinds of rule violations.” The licensee, typically an influential member of the community, would open a series of tiny, unmarked belt shops along with the authorised store. The belt shops would be spread across a wider geography. The excise department largely ignored this practice.
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The excise department official suggested that consumption has also been spurred by a system of sales targets that the department informally imposed on shop owners. “If last year, say I sold 1 lakh cases in my jurisdiction, this time I have to increase it by 10 percent, to protect revenue. So we had to fix targets for shop owners.”
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That system has been scrapped by the new regime. Yet, this situation—where officials face constant pressure to sell alcohol but are also in-charge of regulating it—is actually quite common across India.
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Alcohol sales contribute more than 15% of the state’s own tax revenue in 21 states. In 2019-2020, the countrywide collection from excise duty on liquor was estimated to be ₹1.75 lakh crore: that is roughly 1% of the country’s gross domestic product, or GDP.
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From 2016-17, the state’s overall revenue dropped by almost ₹1500 crore, “primarily because of reduction in revenue of ₹3,112 crore due to imposition of prohibition.”
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In Andhra Pradesh, prohibition was one of the key planks on which the ambitious young YS Jaganmohan Reddy fought the 2019 assembly elections. Lakshmana Reddy confirmed to me that the goal is total prohibition by 2024. (That excludes five-star hotels.)
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Data from the excise department indicates that the new alcohol policies are having their intended effect of reducing consumption. From May, when liquor sales resumed after the lockdown, until the end of 2020, sales of IMFL cases fell by 36% and beer by 76% compared to the same period in 2019.
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Following the split with Telangana in 2014, Andhra Pradesh lost a substantial amount of tax revenue produced by the economic engine of Hyderabad. The central government promised financial support to help with budget deficits after the split, but much of that money did not materialise. The switch to the new Goods and Services Tax regime has meant that states have fewer options to generate their own funds. Now, the pandemic has dealt a brutal economic blow. In the budget presented by the Andhra Pradesh government in June 2020, the estimated fiscal deficit was a whopping ₹48,000 crore.
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Andhra Pradesh could lose 10% of its self-generated revenue if the government follows through on full prohibition. What is the plan to make up for it? The answer, for now, is to push the problem down the road by raising prices.
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Alcohol has been consumed here in some form or another since at least 500 BC, according to heritage liquor expert Aniruddha Mookerjee. Across India, people in rural and tribal communities have been making their own liquor from local products. The varieties are many, including toddy from palm in the southern states; feni from palm or cashew in Goa; the flower-based mahua in several Adivasi belts; grain-based liquors in the Himalayan foothills; rice and millet beers in the north-eastern states of India.
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A paper by sociologist Indra Munshi Saldanha pointed to two laws passed by the British in the late 1800s that impacted the Thane district within modern-day Maharashtra: “They had the summary effect of blocking the major sources of liquor—toddy, the fermented/distilled juice of palm tree, and mahua drink…by taxing the former beyond the means of the poor and banning the latter.” After independence, excise department policies continued to push IMFL into the market at the cost of suppressing local liquors. “This alcohol apartheid is basically a fallout of colonial attitudes,” Mookerjee said.
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The mahua flower, from which the liquor is distilled, is a regulated commodity in most states. Nazareth pointed out the unfairness of this—other raw material like grains, rice and cane sugar are not regulated by excise departments.
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The National Family Health Survey (NFHS-4) found that more women from Scheduled Tribes drink alcohol than from any other caste or group. “We’re a country that drinks, it’s part of our culture,” Dias told me. Echoing the point, Mookerjee said, “In large parts of central India, in tribes, and in the Northeast, this Brahmanical divide—a term I use loosely—isn’t there.”
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Konduru, roughly 45 minutes north of Vijayawada, is mainly inhabited by tribal people from the Banjara community. We were there on a mission: I wanted to see just how easy it is to procure illegal country liquor in these parts.
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Popular brands have been replaced by ersatz copies. One such dubious drink is Spy HD. This cheap whiskey—packaged in a plastic bottle—has been likened to the packaging of a floor cleaner by an irate Twitter user. Its label erroneously calls it a “produce” (rather than “product”) of India. One trucker I met in Vijayawada told me that his head and throat hurt when he drinks now. In Konduru, a man complained that the post-Jagan liquor frequently upsets his stomach.
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Among the wealthy, there is a huge demand for alcohol. People simply get it home delivered, Kumar said. Meanwhile, those languishing in prisons are the poor who are arrested for drinking, or Pasi and Musahar people from Dalit communities that have long depended upon manufacturing and selling toddy.
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It can be useful, when grappling with issues of addiction, to consider how people became addicted in the first place, and what that may tell us about treatment.
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Professor Robert Dudley, who teaches integrative biology at the University of California at Berkeley, developed a line of inquiry suggesting humans are evolutionarily hardwired to seek out alcohol
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He calls it the “drunken monkey” hypothesis. It’s based on the idea that primates, our ancestors, are fruit eaters. But fruit is hard to spot in the canopy of trees, and so these primates rely heavily on smell—particularly the distinctive smell of fermenting fruit.
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But, Dudley said, “in the modern context with humans, it all goes badly wrong.” First off, the process of distillation exponentially increases the concentration of alcohol, and second, liquor has become easy and cheap to buy. “It’s a mismatch,” Dudley said, “between our evolutionary environment and the modern technological environment.”