Government has to frame guidelines over the outlets
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Rajahmundry: The state government announced the new liquor policy for a period of two years beginning form July 1, 2015. However it has not yet come up with clear guidelines on how it plans to run over 500 retail outlets on its own. It had made it clear that out of a total of about 5,000 outlets, it intends to run 10 per cent of them in the state.
It is not new for the excise authorities to run a few liquor retail outlets as they did it earlier through AP Beverages Corporation Limited. As the APBCL is defunct at present, the state government has to issue guidelines as to how it plans to run the outlets.
Excise sources maintain that as per earlier plan, the state government will appoint an office supervisor and one or two assistants to help him or her through outsourcing. They will be paid fixed wages and their job is to sell liquor across the counter. Another issue of setting up retail outlets by hiring accommodation also needs to be clarified. Hiring of accommodation is a big task as it involves incurring huge sums of money. In case of urban areas, the rentals will range from a minimum of Rs 10,000 and above even for one or two small rooms just to stack the stock and sell.
Moreover, the state wants to set up such outlets in mandal headquarters and also in municipalities where there is more demand for liquor. This means that the liquor outlets have to be set up in areas where the density of population is more and rentals for accommodation will certainly be high.
In some cases, though the excise authorities intend to allot retail outlets through draw of lots, some of them fail to be allotted when no party arrives to take them. For instance in East Godav-ari, out of 555 retail outlets meant for allocation in 2013-14, nearly 121 outlets remain un-allotted.
Again in 2014-15, out of a total of 562 outlets, about 97 remained un-allotted. In such cases, the excise authorities issue notifications to allot them multiple times and even then, there are instances where outlets remain un-allotted. Such un-allotted outlets may also be run by the government depending upon the viability of the business. East Godavari exc-ise deputy commissioner C. Vivekananda Reddy said, “As per new excise policy, we have issued notification for allotment of outlets through a draw of lots for two years and allotments will be done on June 29 and 30.”
( Source : deccan chronicle )
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