HYDERABAD: Liquor shops purchased over Rs200 crore worth of liquor in the last three days by issuing post-dated cheques. The government allowed liquor shop owners to do so to procure as much liquor as possible before the Election Commission imposed restrictions after announcing the schedule for the Assembly polls.
The normal procedure is that liquor dealers should purchase stocks by paying challans to the TS Beverages Corporation Ltd. No credit facility is available.
When many dealers expressed helplessness to purchase more stocks citing a fund crunch, the government allowed them to procure stocks against post-dated cheques.
The dealers utilised this opportunity and purchased the stock of Rs70 crore on each of the three days since Tuesday.
The state government anticipates that the EC will release poll notification in the first week of October for polling in the first week of December.
Once the poll schedule is announced, the EC takes several steps to check the flow of liquor. The EC regularly obtains data from officials on daily liquor sales and compares it with the sales on the same day last year. If it notices abnormal patterns, it will initiate several steps to curb the sale of liquor.
Liquor continues to be the major revenue source for the fund-starved government after the ruling party announced several sops. The government advanced the granting of liquor licences for a two-year period for setting up liquor shops by three months and earned Rs2,600 crore through a non-refundable application fee of Rs2 lakh to submit each application for a licence. The licence fees would fetch another Rs3,500 crore.
