The Madras High Court came down heavily on the Tamil Nadu government’s decision to re-open liquor shops in the state owing to no enforcement of social distancing, no maintenance of receipts and non-compliance with the court’s order to ration out liquor sales, the court's order's copy has revealed.
On Friday,
the Madras High Court passed an order to shut all liquor shops in the state that re-opened the previous day. It ruled that only online sale and home delivery of alcohol may be allowed. A look at the order's copy provides some insight into why the judiciary came down heavily on the physical sale of alcohol in Tamil Nadu.
The Tamil Nadu government has monopoly over alcohol retail in the state through its marketing arm, the Tamil Nadu State Marketing Corporation or TASMAC.
No Receipts
Interesting to note is that merely a day before ordering all TASMAC outlets to shut, the Madras High Court refused to stay the state government’s order to re-open these shops. However, the court listed out
a set of measures that each TASMAC outlet had to follow on re-opening.
One of these measures was to demand proof of residence from customers, ID and Aadhaar numbers. This was done with the intention of restricting sales to only residents of the district in question. This also ensured that residents of Chennai (where TASMAC outlets have not been allowed to re-open) did not cross district borders to stock up on alcohol.
On Friday, the court observed that TASMAC could not produce even a single sale receipt with the necessary details, before calling for the closure of these outlets.
No Rationing
One of the key aspects of the court’s order while allowing for alcohol sales was that all customers would only be allowed to buy one bottle, and could make a purchase once every three days. This order was passed in order to ensure tipplers wouldn’t stock up on alcohol and or gather in large crowds to buy alcohol every day.
However, the court observed on Friday that this system of rationing was not followed by TASMAC outlets. “The number of bottles to be sold to each buyer as restricted by the court, was flouted,” the court’s order stated. This was pointed out by the petitioners, Kamal Haasan’s political party, Makkal Needhi Maiyam, in court.
No online sales or social distancing
One of the ways of preventing overcrowding outside liquor shops, the court observed, was to begin online sales of alcohol. However, that hasn’t quite happened in the two days that TASMAC outlets have re-opened. In TASMAC’s defence, this may have been the case owing to the time taken to re-start back-end infrastructure that would allow for online payment and pick-up at a TASMAC store.
In an earlier chat with CNBCTV18.com, payment gateway HipBar said that existing infrastructure for online payment and pick-up could be re-started at liquor stores only after a week since re-opening. “We will need some time to re-automate the entire process of online payments and online pick-up,”
HipBar’s Founder and CEO Prasanna said, “We should be able to re-start operations in a week to 10 days.”
However, in the interim and the absence of online sales, there have been widespread reports of overcrowding outside TASMAC outlets, with the court observing that the state machinery was not in a position to control customers.
