Chandigarh, March 21: Bachhus lovers will have to shell out more to get their favourite brand with the UT administration hiking the price of both countrymade and Indian Made Foreign Liquor (IMFL) by up to 15%.
However, under the new excise policy released for 2018-19 on Tuesday, the rates of beer and wine remain unchanged. In fact, the policy states that it wants to promote low alcoholic content beverages.
Meanwhile, despite the hike, the prices are still lesser than that in neighbouring Punjab and Haryana.
The new policy will come into force from April 1. The exact prices will be determined once vends are allotted through a bidding process in the last week of March, said Wine Merchants Association president Satya Pal.
Under the new policy, the number of vends has gone up from 77 to 93. Last year, the number of vends had been slashed because of the highway liquor ban. In terms of ease of doing business, the security amount at the time of allotment has been relaxed from 40% to 25%. It will be mandatory for all retail licencees to issue an invoice on sale of liquor.
Also, now departmental stores registered under the Goods and Service Tax Act, 2017, will be able to sell imported and Indian wine besides imported beer after obtaining a new license with a fee of Rs 2 lakh.
In 2018-19, the UT excise and taxation department has set a target to earn Rs 450-crore revenue as compared to Rs 354 crore collected last year.
The quota of liquor bottles has been increased for IMFL from 74-lakh proof litre (PL) litre to 90-lakh PL and for countrymade liquor from 8-lakh PL to 10-lakh PL.
Strength of alcohol is measured in terms of ‘Degree Proof’. Strength of such alcohol 13 parts of which weigh exactly equal to 12 parts of water at 51°F is assigned 100 Degree proof. Apparent volume of a given sample of alcohol when converted into volume of alcohol having strength 100 Degree is called PL.
Meanwhile, extra licence fee/excise duty on countrymade liquor has been nominally increased from Rs 28 to Rs 30 per PL and on IMFL from Rs 30–Rs 325 per PL to Rs 33–Rs 325 per PL.
To promote low alcoholic content beverages and Indian wine Industry, the fee has been reduced from Rs 20 per proof bulk litre to Rs 15 per proof bulk litre.
Meanwhile, a cess of Rs 2 per bulk litre has been introduced on wholesale licence. The collected fee will be given to Indian Red Cross Society’s Chandigarh branch.
City residents guzzled down 42,000 bottles of liquor daily, on average, from April 1, 2017, to March 20 this year. The consumption was 50% more than that in 2016-17. In all, 1.52 crore bottles were consumed, of which 1.31 crore were of Indian Made Foreign Liquor (IMFL) and the remaining 21 lakh were of countrymade liquor.
Source Hindustan Times
