CHANDIGARH:
Liquor vends in Punjab are not issuing bills to their customers despite the
state government making it mandatory from April 1 under the
new excise policy. Activists, who want the liquor trade to be better regulated, claim that billing is not being done because of lax enforcement by the excise department.
After getting a complaint from road safety activist Harman Sidhu, president of Arrive Safe, the CM’s office on Thursday directed for “immediate action as per government rules and policy in the matter”. It was on Sidhu’s PIL that the Punjab and Haryana high court had made bills mandatory. The activist was also responsible for liquor vends being removed from state and national highways in the country.
On Thursday, TOI visited a couple of vends in Mohali and asked for a bill after buying a bottle. However, vend owners flatly refused. One vendor insisted that the billing norm was only meant for ‘modern liquor shops’ (designed like department stores).
Sidhu denies any such exception. “I went to three liquor vends on April 3 near Kharar bus stand, Morinda bypass (NH-95) and at Khamanon (NH-95) and asked for an invoice against purchase of liquor. I have the bottles with me. The vendors denied invoices and said they don’t have any such direction from the excise department,” Sidhu said.
‘Many don’t have infrastructure to start billing’
Harman Sidhu, president of Arrive Safe said that if the state government did not give necessary directions for strict compliance of the high court order, he would move a civil contempt petition.
Sidhu wanted the billing to start for two reasons – so that vendors don’t
overprice bottles and customers have a record to fall back on if they have doubts about the quality of the tipple.
Sangrur-based RTI activist Kamal Anand added that there was not just lack of awareness about the new policy but the contractors also need to put an entire system of billing in place so that a proper record is maintained. “Many of them don’t have the back-end infrastructure to start billing customers,” he said.
An excise department official said the new policy was in place and it was obligatory for vend owners to issue bills. “If a complaint is received, it will be looked into but we are not doing random checks for now,” he said.
It was on March 6 that Punjab and Haryana High Court had made it obligatory for
liquor vendors to issue invoices for all sales. Earlier, the Haryana government had incorporated a provision in its 2017-2018 excise policy making it mandatory for vendor to issue bills but only for total sale of liquor exceeding Rs 1,000.:
