High court raps excise department on liquor vends

SHIMLA: Himachal Pradesh high court on Friday pulled up the excise and taxation department for failing to check opening up of liquor vends near educational and religious institutions.
Hearing a petition about a restaurant-cum-bar being opened on a road leading to a government engineering college in Mandi even before the college was inaugurated, a division bench of Justice Deepak Gupta and Justice Kuldip Singh observed, "In case the allegation of the petitioner is correct that this restaurant-cum-bar will cater to students of the college and nobody else.It makes a mockery of the avowed policy of the state to ensure those youngsters are kept away from intoxicants."
The judges noted that the issue of location of liquor vends was coming before courts time and again and pointed out that when the Cigarette and Other Tobacco Products Act 2003 prohibited sale of tobacco products within 100 meters radius, why should liquor be permitted to be sold only at a distance of 60 meters from educational institutions.
"Health of the children and the future of our society is much more important than revenue collected by the state," the judges opined. They also observed that it was noticed liquor was being sold to many underage persons and asked the principal secretary, excise, to let the court know whether any liquor vend owner or salesman in the last 10 years had been booked for selling liquor to underage persons.
The judges also decreed that the 2013-14 excise police spell out minimum age of a person to whom liquor could be sold. Noting that drunken driving was the chief cause of accidents in Himachal and the state had a stronger law that other states about drunken driving, treating the offence equivalent to culpable homicide not amounting to murder, the judges observed, "We see no reason how the said state can permit liquor vends to be opened on highways."
The court directed that a committee headed by the chief secretary should prepare a draft excise policy in which minimum age a person who can purchase liquor be defined in a clause about minimum distance of a liquor vend from educational institutions, places of religious worships and highways.