HOOCH: THE COST OF A CHEAP DRINK
Bootlegging is big business in India, worth thousands of crores—but also one that all too often proves deadly. Over the past decade, more than 800 people have lost their lives to illicit liquor, but neither the scale nor the regularity with which these tragedies occur has led to a systemic fix. The simple reason is that there is too much easy money in it for a powerful nexus of local players. Bad booze is cheap, the lives it claims even cheaper, apparently.
THE LATEST TRAGEDY
July 29, 2020, Mucchal, Punjab
On the night of July 29, five people died after drinking poisonous country liquor in Mucchal and Tangra villages in Punjab’s Amritsar district. Two days later, the death count rose to 21, leading Chief Minister Amarinder Singh to order a statewide probe and crackdown. By August 5, over 117 people had died in Tarn Taran, Amritsar and Gurdaspur districts because of the bad batch of hooch (see Brewing Bad). More than 100 people have been arrested, after raids on manufactories, wholesalers and distributors across Punjab. They include three women bootleggers—Balwinder Kaur of Amritsar’s Mucchal village and Triveni and Darshana from Gurdaspur’s Batala. They were allegedly supplied by a notorious booze trafficker, Gurpal Singh of Tarn Taran’s Dhotian village (see The Hooch Economy). Cops suspect the liquor was manufactured in Patiala or Ludhiana district. (A Ludhiana-based paint shop owner, Rajesh Joshi, has been arrested on suspicion of having supplied denatured spirit to the manufacturers of the spurious liquor.)
THE HOOCH ECONOMY
Bootlegging is big business. Officially, Punjab earns over Rs 5,000 crore a year from taxes on the sale of liquor; while there are no official estimates, the untaxed illicit liquor economy is believed to be roughly the same size. It also mirrors the formal economy, with an unregulated parallel network of distillery owners, transporters and liquor bootleggers. One of the women accused in this case—Mucchal’s Balwinder Kaur—has reportedly been in the business for decades. The business thrives with the acquiescence of politicians, the police and excise officials.
BREWING BAD
Moonshine, hooch, country liquor, bathtub gin—there are as many names for homemade alcohol as there are ways of making it. The basic idea is straightforward. Almost any sugar-containing substance will ferment into alcohol if sufficiently coaxed to do so. This includes grapes, apples, grains and potatoes. The cheapest of the cheap stuff—the illicitly brewed rotgut sold explicitly for the purposes of swift intoxication—is made from food waste, rotten fruits and vegetables, grain husk, and the flowers and berries of wild plants. For an added kick, chemicals like denatured spirits, isopropyl alcohol and methanol are thrown in (otherwise used as paint thinners, disinfectants and as industrial alcohol). Why? Because it’s being sold in peg-sized pouches for as little as Rs 10 apiece—these are not drinks, they are cheap and certain ‘hits’.
THE BAR IS LOW
The black market for booze is highly decentralised, given the low entry barrier— alcohol distilling isn’t exactly rocket science— and the enormous potential profits. Hooch avoids taxes at multiple levels, from distilling to transport to sales, which has the effect of keeping it dirt cheap—where a bottle of ‘official alcohol’ sells for Rs 150, the desi variant goes for about Rs 60 (of course, with the added risk of blindness, organ damage or outright death). While alcohol is easy enough to ferment, removing the poisonous byproducts of the chemical process is a separate matter. Nonetheless, in the midst of the Covid pandemic and the lockdowns it necessitated, hooch sellers have had something of a captive market for the past few months.