BENGALURU: Expressing serious concern over breweries and similar establishments in urban spaces that are permitting the entry of minor children and serving liquor to them without verifying their age, the Karnataka High Court directed that managements must initiate rigorous age verification, whether through Aadhaar or other valid identification, at the entry.
Further verification should follow when liquor is ordered by persons who appear youthful or underage, the HC said in a major verdict on Wednesday.
Establishments selling alcohol cannot be complacent, says HC
Justice M Nagaprasanna passed the order, refusing to quash proceedings initiated against the petitioner, V Chitti Babu, a partner in Legacy Brewing Company (LBC), who challenged the case registered against him under the provisions of the Excise Act and Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, for selling intoxicating liquor to children.
A suo motu case was registered by RR Nagar police against the petitioner, after obtaining permission from the magistrate. CCTV footage showed a 15-year-old deceased boy in the brewery, and a postmortem report revealed the presence of alcohol in his body.
The boy died by suicide, jumping from the 7th floor of an apartment complex after consuming liquor at LBC, on January 31, 2026. During the probe, the boy’s friend informed police that they had consumed liquor and smoked at LBC before the boy ended his life.
Dismissing the petition, the court stated that breweries or places where alcohol is sold cannot be complacent. Age verification cannot be a perfunctory ritual; it must be a practice with display of conspicuous warnings and insistence of documentary proof.
When minors gain entry and order intoxicants, whether served overtly or consumed covertly, managements of such establishments cannot wash their hands of any cases.
Protection of youngsters is not merely a statutory mandate, it is a moral imperative. The managements would be held accountable for any lapses, the court noted.
The petitioner’s counsel contended that only food was served to the deceased, not liquor, which they had brought along in a bag surreptitiously, and drunk without knowledge of the staff or management.
Additional State Public Prosecutor BN Jagadeesha submitted that the story given by the counsel for the petitioner needs to be investigated, and the magistrate’s order in permitting the probe cannot be construed to be suffering from non-application of mind. It is an admitted norm that liquor from outside is not permitted within such establishments. If minors could carry intoxicants inside, evade detection and consume them unchecked, it demands scrutiny.
Investigation becomes imperative to ascertain how underage individuals gained entry without age verification; whether any mechanism existed to scrutinise documents, whether supervisory safeguards were in place and statutory obligations cast upon the licensee were discharged with vigilance, the court observed.
Initially, police treated the death of the boy as suicide and registered an unnatural death report. Later, a probe revealed that the deceased, along with other boys of the same age, had consumed alcohol in the brewery. This was confirmed by CCTV footage.
The court said the reason for his death may be manifold, including consumption of alcohol. The issue is how a 15-year-old boy is given entry into a brewery, where he consumed alcohol unchecked. Whether his death is casually linked to the consumption of alcohol is, at this juncture, a matter of investigation, the court said.