As Highways Go the Dry Way, Why Take City Bars Along?

As watering holes and hotels in cities go dry, The Quint asks if this is an unintended fallout of the liquor ban.

Take a minute and try to visualise the impact of the Supreme Court’s ban on the sale and serving of liquor within half a kilometre of state and national highways. You’re probably thinking of thekas and bars lining highways far removed from the city.

Yet, the liquor ban that has come into effect from 1 April also applies to hundreds of establishments within city limits. Cities that have either state or national highways passing through them. As a result, numerous hotels, restaurants, bars and liquor stores in urban centres have had to go dry as well.

Is this a desired consequence or an unintended fallout of the move to curb drunken driving?

A well-placed government official told The Quint, “The Supreme Court has passed the order without considering some of the practical difficulties. There are national and state highways within cities as well. Hundreds of restaurants and hotels in cities will also be affected by this ban. What will they do?”

Is There A ‘Beech Ka Rasta’?

Mahesh Sharma, Union Minister for Tourism and Culture, assured hoteliers and restaurant owners that the government would seek a middle path, if there was one.

Beech ka raasta agar ho toh nikalenge.

Union Minister Mahesh Sharma

But where is this middle ground? State governments are trying to find out as well.

An NDTV report states that Rajasthan is set to designate parts of highways that pass through populated areas as urban roads if they are connected by a bypass. If implemented, stretches of highways that pass through limits of cities and towns will be made immune to the top court order.

Streetsmart Haryana

Haryana, on the other hand, will use 'motorable distance' and not a straight line inward, as the crow flies, to decide a bar's distance from the highway in Gurugram.

Additionally, the entry to Cyber Hub near Shankar Chowk has been moved further inside Cyber City, making the motorable distance from NH-8 more than the requisite half a kilometre. The effect of these twin decisions: a reprieve from the liquor ban for several establishments in Cyber Hub.

Similarly, reports suggest that Ambience mall and the Leela Kempinski hotel near NH-8 have shifted their entry points to make the motorable distance from the highway more than 500 metres.

Denotification Drives Next?

Government officials explain that it is up to a state to denotify state highways. For national highways, though, states have to approach the Centre.

However, a source in the Union government told The Quint that no state has made such a request since the onset of the liquor ban.  

A report in The Hindu states that the Kerala government is considering denotifying state highways to sidestep the court order. The southern state is staring at revenue losses to the tune of ₹7,000 crore. But if Kerala does follow through in re-categorising state highways as district highways, will the judiciary frown upon the move?

Chandigarh’s decision to redesignate state highways as major district roads hasn’t gone off too smoothly either. Harman Sidhu, the man behind the original petition to ban liquor vends along highways, has challenged Chandigarh’s denotification drive in the Supreme Court.

The governments of Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh too have begun denotifying state highways to circumvent the ruling, an excise official told The Times of India.

But bureaucrats in Maharashtra have reportedly said that the state government’s idea of denotifying highways was not going to be easy to implement.

Within the government too, not everyone is keen on the idea. PWD Minister Chandrakant Patil told Mumbai Mirror that if an urban local body wants to denotify highways, it should make a proposal to the same effect. But he questioned if the civic bodies could maintain the highways.

A top BMC official was quoted as saying that there was “no question of taking over such additional responsibilities”.

So where will the buck stop?

'Hotel Industry Paralysed'

Take the national capital, for example. Hotels in the Aerocity complex near the Delhi airport and restaurants and bars situated along NH-8 fall under the purview of the liquor ban.

In Mumbai, around 500 restaurants and bars that fall within half a kilometre of the city’s highways have chosen to stay shut after the ban came into force.

Down south in Chennai, some of the city’s top hotel bars have stopped serving alcohol. Including the Hyatt’s 365 AS, the QBar at the Hilton and Rhapsody at Courtyard by Marriott. The Madras Gymkhana Club and the Cosmopolitan Club are in the same boat.

Instead of addressing the problem of drunken driving through proper patrolling and use of breath analysers, you have transferred the whole problem to the hotel industry – at the cost of tourism, foreign exchange and unemployment.

Rakesh Mathur, Member of the Indian Heritage Hotels Association

Before stepping into a meeting of the Federation of Associations in Indian Tourism and Hospitality (FAITH), Mathur told The Quint that the umbrella body had convened to discuss how to take the matter forward with the government.

“The liquor ban is paralysing the entire industry. Authorised hotel projects, which entail billions of dollars in investment, have been brought to a standstill,” he said.

Instead of attacking the root cause of drunken driving, we have cut off the entire tree. We will appeal to the government to make a distinction between hotels/restaurants and roadside vends. We want the ban to be removed.

Rakesh Mathur

Sanjay Narula, Managing Director of a Delhi-based travel agency, Apex Travel and Tours, said that he can’t possibly suggest a hotel to his clients if it doesn’t sell liquor.

Corporate clients cannot imagine a daylong conference ending with dinner but not having alcohol. We can no longer recommend any of the hotels that fall within the 500-metre radius. And that list includes several of the region’s top hotels.

Narula added, “Hotels must be exempted from the ban. There are some great hotels along the highways as well. The government has to look at how to salvage the situation. This must be discussed in Parliament.”

In an urgent meeting in Gurugram on Sunday, stakeholders of the travel, tourism and hospitality industries decided to appeal to PM Narendra Modi and state Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar to resolve the crisis. So far, they have decided to not file a review petition against the Supreme Court order.

With hoteliers and restaurateurs across the country registering their protest, will the Centre buckle to the pressure from the hospitality industry? At stake are the revenues the industry brings to the government’s coffers.

But in a country where there is plenty of political capital in favouring prohibition, can the administration risk being seen as opposing a move to curb drunken driving?

'Prevent the Loss of Lives or Revenue?'

Lawyer Ravi Kamal Gupta, who represented petitioner Harman Sidhu in court, does not consider the losses being incurred by the hospitality industry enough reason for the ban to be reworked or modified.

The case is an exercise in balancing civil liberties and robust revenues. Here, we are comparing the weightage given to the life of a person at risk to the revenues that are accrued by selling liquor. Think of the families who have lost people to drunken driving when you consider that.

“This move will be able to curb the menace of drunken driving to a large extent,” Gupta added.

When asked if establishments within cities were the collateral damage of this ban, Gupta disagreed. “The purpose was to curb drunken driving at any place and at any time. Why should liquor stores within cities be treated any differently?”

Should five-star hotels along highways be exempted?

Drunken driving is not a phenomenon unique to truck drivers. There have been so many instances of those in BMWs and similar cars driving rashly under the influence of alcohol. There is no excuse to exempt certain hotels or restaurants from this ban.

Missing the Target?

The hardships will fall on the existing vendors much more than the drivers. The driver will find a way to get his liquor. How difficult is it for someone to drive a distance of 500 metres to get alcohol? It is not an onerous distance at all. This may even encourage people to pick up alcohol and consume it on the way.

Kishu Daswani, Professor of Law at Mumbai’s Government Law College

Daswani isn’t convinced about the need for the distinction between small towns and larger urban areas either. “Towns with fewer than 20,000 people have a reduced limit of 220 metres. Why that distinction? The reasoning doesn’t add up.”

“Entire residential areas are now being debarred from having bars and restaurants that serve liquor,” he further said. “This can be averted if the government chooses to pass a notification exempting those parts of the highway that fall within municipality limits. But it will be difficult to demarcate those zones. Civilisation grows on either side of highways.”

So if you consider all the different grades of civic bodies, how many will you possibly exempt?