HYDERABAD: Believe it or not, the Telangana government made big money from liquor sales in the first five months of this fiscal, when the country was under a total lockdown for over 30 days and was just beginning to cope with the Covid-19 pandemic.
In an RTI reply, the Telangana State Beverages Corporation Limited has stated that the government accrued a whopping Rs 7,907.88 crore from April to August through liquor sales.
This beats the Rs 6,095.03 crore that it had earned in a one-year period, from 2014 to 2015. One may wonder how this was possible when liquor shops across the State were shut from the last week of March as part of a nationwide lockdown and reopened only in early May.
Well, the government had hiked the prices recently.
Replying to the RTI query by activist Sudheer Jalagam, the Telangana State Beverages Corporation Limited also released details of the revenue earned through liquor sales in the past: Rs 8,753.43 crore in 2015-16, Rs 9,024.43 crore in 2016-17, Rs 8,534.48 crore in 2017-18, Rs 10,283.63 crore in 2018-19 and Rs 14,566.74 crore in 2019-20. However, if Value Added Tax (VAT) and other duties were added, amounts would have been much higher.
The RTI reply also revealed that no deaths were reported due to consumption of illicit liquor in Telangana from 2014-15 onwards.
However, there are only three Regional Prohibition and Excise Laboratories located in Hyderabad, Nizamabad and Warangal.
These have an extensive jurisdiction — Hyderabad, Rangareddy, Mahbubnagar, Nizamabad, Medak, Adilabad, Warangal, Nalgonda, Khammam and Karimnagar districts.