No desperate sale of liquor on Mar 31

Deepkamal Kaur

Tribune News Service

Jalandhar, March 26

Coming as a big disappointment to the tipplers, who are awaiting the low price sales of booze on March 31 to stock up their bars, there will most likely be no such desperate sale of liquor like previous years.

The reason: The new Punjab excise policy stipulates that the licence holders can carry forward their left-over stock to the new zone that gets allocated to them in the statewide draw to be held tomorrow, which was not allowed by the department earlier.

The liquor contractors, however, are relatively quite upbeat at the decision. Since most of them get a chance in a draw at one or the other zone, they are quite confident that there would not have to arrange for any drum beating and make last day sales to clear their stock.

Perhaps for the same reason, there have been as many as 54,500 applications for the draw, fetching the department an income of Rs 308 crore through non-refundable application fee alone against an amount of Rs 267 crore collected last year on this account.

In Jalandhar alone, there have been 4,791 applications this year for 21 zones, fetching the department an amount of Rs 30.62 crore. There were just 2,117 applications last year which had brought the department only Rs 16.62 crore then.

Another scheme of the excise policy this time entails that the security amount to be paid after the draw this time has been brought down to just 10 per cent from 15 earlier. Even the instalment plan has been changed.

“The monthly instalments for the first four months have been kept at just 9 per cent, which would get escalated to 10 per cent for the next four months. By the time, it would be festival and marriage season and the contractors would be making a good income, the instalment would increase to 11 per cent for the last trimester,” said Excise and Taxation Commissioner Anurag Verma.

Increasing its targets by 5 per cent, the department is mulling to earn revenue of Rs 346 crore tomorrow as licence fee. The revenue last year was Rs 322 crore. The draw will be held at Red Cross Bhawan tomorrow for nine zones for the Municipal Corporation area and 12 of rural areas in Jalandhar.