The Supreme Court order barring sale of liquor within 500 metres from national and state highways has taken the sleep out of the minds of many state governments regardless of size and population.
The ruling will dent their revenues besides putting paid to their earnings from tourism and hospitality sectors, a big source of revenue for them. Thousands of people employed in liquor outlets will be displaced, while lakhs of people engaged in hospitality and tourism businesses stand to lose their jobs.
Stocks analysts have downgraded ratings on liquor companies sparking a selloff in their shares. Liquor stocks have crashed on the bourses even though the markets reached record highs this week.
State governments have scrambled to find a way out of the legal labyrinth while industry associations and hoteliers have warned of massive job cuts. Some state governments such as Maharashtra, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh have launched a move to redesignate their state highways by denotifying them and making them part of their urban roads.
Some states are lobbying with the Centre, while Kerala has sought more time from the court for implementing the order. Some have even decided to move the apex court pleading for a review of the order while some had already denotified their highways in urban centres well before the ruling came in giving relief to their five-star hotels and pubs.
Many states such as Punjab, Maharashtra, Goa and Uttar Pradesh are said to be exploring the option of denotifying state highways within their cities and towns and turning them into urban roads. Some have even approached the Centre to find out if they can convert national highways into city roads.
Once the stretch of a highway is denotified, it would be the responsibility of civic bodies to look after its maintenance. With denotification, the 500-metre rule imposed by the Supreme Court would no longer apply to them. Not all states have been hit by the SC order as it exempts hilly states such as Himachal Pradesh, Meghalaya and Sikkim.
The two Telugu-speaking states will not be hit by the liquor ban as they were exempted by the Supreme Court on account of their annual excise year extending beyond April 1.
It is evident that the SC order has discomfited one and all. However, the ruling is based on sound footing. The court took serious note of the increasing number of road accidents in the country. At least 1.5 lakh people in India died in road mishaps last year.
The magnitude of the mortality rate far eclipses the size of the revenue losses to be incurred by state governments. This is precisely why the apex court insisted that display boards of liquor vends and bars on national and state highways be banned.
Drunken driving is a global phenomenon that is tackled by governments and cities with the help of police. Penalties for driving offences range from monetary fines to temporary ban of driving licence or total withdrawal of driving licences for repeat offenders.
However, in India the drive against drunken driving is used more to collect bribes. For example, the exercise by police to enforce helmet-wearing by bikers has become a farce. It has turned into a goldmine for corrupt policemen.
The police are seen harassing commuters no end on flimsy grounds. Police sometimes brazenly argue that they collect bribes to make good their ‘investments’ in getting plum postings. This is shocking for a nation on whose roads about 400 deaths occur daily even if deaths due to drunken driving form only a part of these deaths.
Driving in India has no restrictions. In a way this is the easiest job for an unemployed youth in our country. The majority of our drivers are school dropouts. We do not have a mechanism to train drivers and road users in basic principles of road safety.
The number of deaths on our roads has been increasing exponentially. Stretches of national and state highways have turned into killing fields. Granted that closure of liquor shops on highways will not make our roads entirely accident-free, but it will certainly have a sobering effect on road-users.
Considering the colossal loss of human lives due to road mishaps, loss of a few thousand crores of rupees due to the liquor ban is a small price to pay.