UT liquor duty hike dries sales

Once a favourite destination for buying cheap liquor, Chandigarh city is not the first choice of bacchus lovers anymore. The hike in liquor duty this year that brought the prices of liquor being sold in Chandigarh at par with Punjab and Haryana, has hit the UT's excise department hard. Also hit are a host of liquor vends which spend crores to get licences but seem to have clocked in only losses.

A comparison of the sale of liquor in the first two months of this fiscal and last fiscal bares it all showing how the sales have dipped considerably.

While last year, 19.30 lakh litre of beer was sold in two months (May-June 2011) this year the sale is only 18.30 lakh. Similar in country liquor last year 8.75 lakh litres was sold while this year it is only a 3.56 lakh litres. Another 29 lakh litres of whisky was sold while this year it was only 16 lakh has been sold. Last year foreign liquor sold was 25000 litres while this year it is only 19000 litres.

While many there are many others who feel that bringing the rates of liquor in Chandigarh at par with the rates in Punjab and Haryana has led to the dip. The end result was a sharp decline in boot legging of liquor from Chandigarh into neighbouring Mohali and Panchkula.

Arvind Verma, liquor contractor who has 17 liquor shops in the city says, " Barely two months have passed and the balance sheets of almost all the contractors in the city are showing losses. In the coming few months, these are only going to increase. It is high time, that the department should think of a change in policy or this the entire liquor industry will finish soon".

Sources in the department say that on an average every month each liquor vend is recording a sale of only 80,000 cases per month of IMFL( Indian Made Foreign Liquor) as compared to last year's 1.5 lakh cases.

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