“We will not pass any order but states should consider home delivery or indirect sale of liquor to maintain social distancing,” said the Supreme Court via video-conferencing. Refusing to entertain a PIL seeking to ban direct sale of liquor through shops during the lockdown period, the apex court has now advised state governments to consider home delivery of alcohol.
Punjab, West Bengal and Chhattisgarh have already decided to home-deliver alcohol. The Delhi government is also mulling the possibility of doing the same in an attempt to prevent overcrowding in standalone stores. According to Reuters, app-based food delivery company Zomato is also believed to be considering getting into door-delivery of alcohol.
Many believe this is a step in the right direction and a long overdue one. “Home delivery of alcohol should have happened ages ago. But the infrastructure for it is better now,” says sommelier and wine educator Gagan Sharma who lists several benefits accruing from this model. “With door-delivery of alcohol, business will increase, there will be more jobs, black-marketing will reduce, interstate buying will end, there will be lesser cash handling, one can look forward to better price control and data-collection for policymaking. The higher price will ensure quality drinking,” says Sharma. “Once it reaches homes, it will usher in better drinking sensibilities.”
If there are so many gains to be had from home delivery of liquor, what were some of the unfounded fears in the excise department?
“One major fear was how do you check the age of the person who is ordering the alcohol,” says sommelier, TV show host, author and columnist Magandeep Singh. Different states have their own age-appropriate standards for drinking and physical stores somehow manage to offer a notion of deterrence when it came to drinking by minors. However, the nature of these extraordinary times seems to have obliterated that fear for the time being, what with the state coffers drying up. And with travel and hospitality industry hit the hardest, people are ready to spend more on alcohol. But Singh is not very hopeful that door-delivery of alcohol will persist in a post-Corona India.
“If they allow delivery now, it will set a precedence. Once things go back to normal, people will expect the delivery to stay. Then the opposition is going to make the wrong noise. It will becomes a political issue,” says Singh, adding that class divides will also be raked up with online buying being more accessible to a higher-income group. He is also unsure of private food delivery start-ups jumping into the bandwagon.
“Delivery systems required to put in place are tough. They don’t want to give it to a local party like Zomato. It won’t be that easy to get the license yet, from what I have gathered. It’s not uniform across states. Other guys who paid for licences for their shops had such high barriers to entry. How can a Zomato just walk in?”
The importance of liquor as a source of revenue cannot be overstated. For Delhi, alcohol accounts for around 14.1 per cent of its total revenue projections for 2020-21, amounting to Rs 6,279 crore through the sale of liquor. The national lockdown since March 25 has already led to a loss of Rs 645 crore in revenues after the closure of alcohol stores. After the shops were allowed to re-open this week, unmanageable queues outside made a complete mockery of social distancing norms. In response, some states like Delhi imposed a massive “Corona tax” on alcohol sales. As a crowd-control strategy, the Delhi government has also introduced e-tokens which can be bought through a web link, to be issued in limited numbers on an hourly basis. In certain part of Tamil Nadu, the police has proposed age-specific time slots in state-run TASMAC outlets.
But online delivery of alcohol is not such a bad thing in the long run. “Because the world over, 60-70 per cent of the alcohol sales happen in retail. Only 30-35 per cent happen in institutions like hotels and restaurants. Everywhere in the world, people drink more often at home than they do when they are out. In India, that statistic is upside down. It might get aligned with the rest of the world,” says Singh, although he wouldn’t like to jump the gun. “Right now, it difficult to say how it will all work out. E-tokens? How will they administer that people get their alcohol in that one hour? I don’t know,” says Singh.
