After 42 dry days, a spirited opening show

Gurgaon: With 24 bottles of beer, six bottles of wine and another six bottles of IMFL, Manish Kumar could barely walk the few hundred metres from the liquor store to his car. “You can’t take a chance,” he said, with absolute seriousness.
The 42 dry days of lockdown have been trying, and eagerly counted down. Anticipating some of the eagerness, the administration was careful — setting up barricades around the stores and marked circles for people to stand while they waited in line. On Wednesday morning at 8, the shops opened — 130 of the 258 in the city. Police were in place to control the crowd should it turn into a Delhi-like situation. But it did not.
In Gurgaon, buyers at each store were fewer, spread out across sectors and followed social distancing norms. There were no unruly crowds, no uncontrolled rush and many women. Just that each buyer bought a lot of liquor. Like Manish. Because they could. The buying cap in Gurgaon is generous — it allows each resident to stock up on 25.8 litres of alcohol in one go — 4.5 litres each of country liquor, IFL, rum, and vodka, gin or cider, 9 litres each of IMFL and wine and 7.8 litres of beer. It’s over 10 times the limit Delhi has set for its buyers, 2.5 litres. And while prices were up by about 50% because of the demand and an additional cess of about Rs 5-50 per bottle, it was still cheaper than Delhi, where buyers have to shell out a 70% ‘corona tax’.
“You never know. Cases in Gurgaon are going up and the restrictions may come back. We have to keep our stocks,” said Manish. At another store, Praveen Jain, who works with a transport company, was buying for himself and his friends. “I bought everything — beer, wine, all of it. Spent around Rs 30,000 but it’s ok. It’s for all of us,” he said. As he walked away, someone joked: “We are helping the economy. It’s for a good cause.”
Some were seen turning up with lists — drivers and security guards sent on the errand by residents in highrises to buy the stocks they needed to see themselves through the rest of the lockdown. “I was given a list and the money,” said a driver sent by his employer in Sector 40 to stand in a queue expected to be long in a wait expected to be longer. He left the store with a huge amount of expensive liquor. In fact, Sector 40 was one of the few areas in the city where there was any queue at all.
A representative of Discovery Wine, a prominent liquor store chain in Gurgaon, said things have been different here. “Delhi is a big city where just 150 government liquor stores opened. In Gurgaon, which has a much lower population, there were 130 operational stores. Besides, stores in Gurgaon are also built different — they are bigger, spacious and located in open spaces. Social distancing is not difficult,” the representative explained.
The administration, too, said it did not have a difficult day. “All norms were followed and no crowding was spotted,” said deputy excise and taxation commissioner HC Dahiya. A team of excise officials and police had been on rounds. Things were in order all through the day, till 7pm, when stores shut shop after 11 hours of business. “Some vends could not be opened because of administrative matters. But they will all open in the next few days.”
As for the prices, Dahiya said the Haryana excise police does not set a cap on the price and only prescribes a minimum selling price.
The city is divided into zones, each with its own license fee and stores can set their own prices.