I was in Ahmedabad the day the hooch tragedy came to light. It started with a few deaths and then the numbers rose, rapidly.

Events of this nature are particularly tragic involving as they do large numbers of men who are also often the sole or primary breadwinners of families.

The local papers have been full of heartrending pictures not just of young male victims but also of small children and grieving widows. The incident has largely been centred around majoor gam a working class neighbourhood on the eastern side of the Sabarmati river where the city’s the erstwhile textile mills once stood. News of the east rarely travels to the prosperous west but in this case the repercussions of the incident are being felt not just in other parts of the city but all the way up to Gandhinagar.

For an accident to occur on this scale, it is clear that the mechanism for manufacturing, distributing and retailing liquor is in place; it is equally clear that the machinery meant to enforce prohibition in the country’s only dry state is not only ineffective but actually supportive of the banned activity. The spokesperson for the Modi Government may express outrage at Vijay Mallya’s statement calling prohibition a farce in Gujarat but the liquor baron’s views would be corroborated by most people who have ever attempted to purchase or consume liquor in the state.

Indeed the experience of Prohibition in India, and the world over has shown that it rarely works. In the old Bombay Presidency for instance, or even in the United States it was clear that suppressing the legal consumption of liquor only managed to drive it underground and gave rise to a web of corruption involving both law enforcers and administrators. The question is what is to be done now?

... contd.