Key Points
While India, if not I.N.D.I.A., has found its de facto, if not de jure, main opposition leader, a far quieter, but arguably as important, event takes place today: it's the last day for all hotels, clubs and restaurants, along with wholesale and other distributors of the nation's capital city to renew their liquor licence if they want to keep plying the good - or even middling - stuff to Delhi's fine measurers of pegs and pints...
Notwithstanding hosting global events like the much-toasted G20, and the 3-day Burrp Festival that started this Friday - the city's 'biggest beer festival' at the Garden of Five Senses near Saket - Delhi's consumers of alcohol are arguably the worst served among India's metros..
Since the scrapping of the 2021-22 liquor policy of the Delhi Excise Department on July 31, 2022 - by which the AAP government had, for six months since November 2021, allowed private players (L-7 retail vendors) to sell liquor, including using perfectly legit tricks of the trade like discounts and special offers - buying alcohol from stores have, in many places in Delhi, returned to early 2000-era mayhem...
If teetotalers among you could, for one minute, keep aside your 'Beta, daaru peena buri baat hain' and 'Vendors breed corrupt benders' concerns, and treat alcohol buyers of Delhi as one among many other segments of evolving consumers of New India, you could sympathise with the buying experience of liquor - think Lagavulin 16 and Chilean MontGras Intriga Cabernet Sauvignon 2018, and not just 'Haywards 5000' and 'Hercules' - having plummeted after the 'gov vends-only' kanoon kicked in again since September 2022...
With competition (sic) in Delhi's liquor retail industry now 'extended' for the third time to Indira Gandhi 'nationalised banks' level, the city's tipplers will continue to see local brands crowd out larger, wider, higher ones that are increasingly available to consumers elsewhere...
