Excise department now bets on QR-coded labels to track disappearing bottles

Panaji: For years, Goa’s liquor supply chain has been like a leaking bottle. Premium scotch has been trucked in from Haryana, evading duties worth crores. Goa-manufactured whisky has moved out to Maharashtra disguised as pharmaceutical supplies. And through it all, the state’s excise department has had no reliable way to track a single bottle from distillery to retail shelf.

The department wants to change this embarrassing track record through a 10-year contract for a track-and-trace system based on high-security excise adhesive labels (HSEALs) embedded with unique QR codes.

The department currently has no mechanism to detect counterfeit, duplicate or non-duty-paid alcohol moving through the state.

“Currently, the department operates through a combination of administrative processes and existing digital systems such as the Goa Excise Management System (GEMS), which supports various regulatory and operational functions. However, despite the availability of such systems, there exists a significant gap in bottle-level traceability, controlled label lifecycle tracking, and real-time visibility of liquor bottles across the entire supply chain, from production or import to final point of sale,” said a department note.

Every gap in that framework is a gap that smugglers have been exploiting. Four weeks ago, Karnataka excise officials at the Anmod checkpost on the Goa-Karnataka border seized 167 litres (925 bottles) of illegal liquor worth Rs 46,700, cleverly hidden inside a concrete pump machine. A year ago, nearly 700 cases of foreign-made liquor were seized by the department on suspicion that it was being smuggled into Goa from Haryana. The arrest of excise inspector Pramod Zuvenkar for allegedly smuggling alcohol into Karnataka was further embarrassment for the department.

In Feb, govt notified the Goa Excise Duty (Amendment) Rules, 2026, mandating high-security excise adhesive labels on all liquor bottles sold in the state in a bid to curb smuggling, counterfeiting and other illegalities. The department is now moving to ensure that every liquor bottle entering Goa’s supply chain, whether manufactured locally or imported, is assigned a unique digital identity via a tamper-proof sticker.

The labels will be preprinted as inactive, securely supplied to manufacturers, and activated only by authorised excise officials linked. Duplicate scans, out-of-sequence activations and reused labels will be automatically blocked and flagged, said a source.

The department, with the help of Goa Electronics Limited (GEL) and a private vendor, will use AI-based anomaly detection to alert field enforcement teams. Mobile verification tools will allow the team to inspect consignments in real time.
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