Great to see you return to this week’s Politics to Policy edition. This week, we are going to talk about the illicit liquor crisis in India. Read on.

Every hooch tragedy in India arrives with the same newspaper story. Poor labourers, slum settlement, cheap liquor laced with methanol, mass hospitalisation, mounting death toll, official promises of crackdown. Then a few arrests at the retail end. Then silence. Then, months or years later, another headline from another state with the same profile of victims and the same sequence of events.

Since 2002, more than 22,000 deaths have been attributed to illicit or spurious liquor consumption across India. Five states alone, Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka, Punjab, Chhattisgarh, and Uttar Pradesh, account for half of all recorded deaths since 2012. These are the products of a governance architecture that has repeatedly failed to contain a predictable, well-documented public health crisis.

The recent Pune-Pimpri-Chinchwad tragedy, where working-class victims in poor neighbourhoods died after consuming country liquor containing industrial-grade methanol brought in from outside the state, follows that same architecture exactly.

Methanol (CH3OH) and ethanol (C2H5OH) are chemically distinct but physically indistinguishable to the naked eye. They look alike, smell alike, and produce similar initial sensations of intoxication. The difference is that methanol, when metabolised by the human body, converts into formaldehyde and formic acid. Even a small quantity, more than 0.1 ml of pure methanol per kilogram of body weight for an adult, can cause blindness, organ failure, and death.

Bootleggers add it to illicit brews for one reason: it is cheap, widely available as an industrial solvent, and dramatically increases the apparent potency of a batch at negligible cost. There is a persistent and misguided belief among those who produce illicit liquor that by diluting methanol, similar intoxicating effects to regular alcohol can be achieved. The dilution ratios are guesswork. The consequences, when they go wrong, are mass casualties.

India consumes 4.3 million tons of methanol annually, making it the world's second-largest consumer after China. Most of this is legitimate industrial use. But the supply chain that moves methanol from chemical plants to end users is multi-state, multi-intermediary, and carries tracking gaps that bootleggers exploit systematically. After the Punjab tragedy in May 2025, the state's Finance and Excise Minister wrote to the Union Minister of Commerce and Industry, stressing that the existing legal framework did not sufficiently address supply chain vulnerabilities of methanol and mandated no tracking mechanisms, registration of buyers, or cross-state regulation.

That letter describes a gap that has been visible since at least the 2015 Malvani tragedy. It remains open.

When enforcement does respond to a hooch tragedy, it responds at the retail end. The vendor is arrested. The local distributor may be detained. The police station in the affected district sees suspensions. This is what a crackdown looks like from the outside.

In Bihar, police made 47 arrests across two districts within days of the October 2024 tragedy that killed at least 37 people. Senior officers described it as "following a similar pattern to the 2022 hooch cases," with liquor packaged in pouches and smuggled from neighbouring Uttar Pradesh. Identical language, identical geography, two years apart.

The Malvani case in Mumbai illustrates what happens when enforcement goes further up the chain. The 2015 tragedy killed 106 people and left 75 with severe disabilities. Nine years later, in April 2024, a sessions court convicted four of fourteen accused, acquitting the other ten. The court found that examination of nearly 240 witnesses did not define a clear chain of evidence, and the prosecution failed to prove the involvement of most accused in criminal conspiracy.

Four convictions from 106 deaths, nine years later, with the conspiracy charge proved only against the retail-level operators. The methanol supplier who had procured chemicals from Gujarat and distributed them to local vendors was among the convicted. The broader network that enabled the supply remained legally unproven.

This is the pattern at every level: enforcement that arrives after the death toll is public, concentrates on visible actors, and struggles to dismantle the upstream operations that make the next tragedy possible.

Methanol in India is a legal industrial chemical. It is categorised as a Class B poison in many states, but it is cheaper than biologically produced alcohol and carries no consumption prohibition in its own right. Its diversion into illicit liquor networks depends on intermediaries who acquire it through industrial supply channels and re-route it. Because methanol's primary market is legitimate, the entire procurement infrastructure for it exists and operates openly.

The movement of denatured spirit across state lines requires permits from both the originating and receiving states. While this is constitutionally sound, given that states retain control over intoxicating liquors, it creates a significant logistical challenge for industries and, in parallel, creates bureaucratic complexity that weakens oversight in practice.

When enforcement does try to trace a supply chain, it often starts from a tragedy and works backwards through witnesses. In the Punjab 2025 case, GST bills from a methanol purchase helped investigators track the truck that brought methanol from Delhi. The trail existed. It had to be found after the deaths, not before them.

The absence of prospective tracking, combined with fragmented state-level oversight and no central registration requirement for methanol buyers, means the diversion risk is structural. Each state monitors its own territory. The chemical crosses multiple state lines before it reaches the batch that kills someone.

The most striking demonstration of the enforcement gap is Bihar. In April 2016, the state imposed one of India's most comprehensive prohibition regimes, banning the manufacture, sale, and consumption of alcohol entirely.

Since the prohibition came into effect, more than 350 people have died in hooch tragedies across Bihar, with the majority of deaths concentrated in northern districts. The Patna High Court, in an October 2022 judgment, found that the Bihar government had failed to implement prohibition, that liquor was freely available in the state, that minors were transporting it, and that fewer cases had been registered against kingpins of liquor cartels than against poor people caught consuming.

In one year, Bihar lost approximately Rs 5,000 crore in excise tax revenue from the prohibition. Cognizable offences in the state rose 13% in the six months following the ban's introduction. Around 11.38 lakh cases pertaining to violation of the liquor law have been lodged across Bihar over the ten years since prohibition, with the courts and jails absorbing the volume of primarily consumption-level offences.

The Bihar case might sound like an argument against prohibition in principle. It is not. It is evidence of what prohibition looks like when the enforcement architecture cannot match the policy ambition. The legal market was eliminated. The illegal market expanded, with less quality control and greater risk to consumers. The state bore both the revenue loss and the enforcement cost, without producing safety.

Gujarat's prohibition presents a similar pattern. Despite the state's long-standing ban, a study found that 38% of youth in Gujarat consume alcohol, with the government confirming that prohibition had increased smuggling from neighbouring states. Gujarat is losing an estimated Rs 15,000 crore annually in revenue from the policy.

A different enforcement failure operates in states where alcohol remains legal but heavily taxed. Taxes in India typically comprise 65 to 80% of the final retail price of alcohol. For the upper end of the market, this is a manageable cost. For daily-wage labourers, it creates a price gap between legal liquor and illicit alternatives that the illicit market has filled reliably for decades.

Public health analysis estimates that illicit and unrecorded alcohol accounts for approximately 40% of total alcohol consumption in India. This is the market that operates entirely outside quality regulation, without labelling requirements, without source traceability, and with no accountability when batches are contaminated.

The pricing dynamic creates a structural dependency. States cannot significantly lower excise duties without foregoing revenue that many depend on as their second or third largest own-tax source. In 2018-19, state governments across India collectively earned approximately Rs 1.47 lakh crore from alcohol excise. This revenue dependence is the exact reason alcohol tax policy is made by finance ministries, with public health consequences treated as secondary.

The cost of that tradeoff does not fall on the finance ministry. A longitudinal economic analysis covering 2011 to 2050 estimates that alcohol-attributable deaths and health system costs will produce a net economic loss of approximately Rs 97,895 billion to India after adjusting for excise tax receipts, amounting to an average annual loss of 1.45% of GDP. The illicit segment of that burden carries no offsetting tax revenue at all.

Hooch tragedies regularly produce murder charges. They rarely produce murder convictions. The gap between the charge and the outcome reflects a prosecution problem that runs deeper than investigator competence.

Establishing criminal conspiracy in an illicit supply chain requires proving that multiple actors at different levels of the network acted with shared intent. In practice, the physical evidence tends to concentrate at the retail level, witnesses are drawn from communities where cooperation with law enforcement carries costs, and the upstream supply chain operates across state lines with documentation that becomes harder to reconstruct after the fact.

In a Madhya Pradesh case, two police constables were themselves arrested for involvement in the spurious liquor network, alongside a doctor and a medical store employee who had made spirit available to bootleggers. When enforcement personnel are participants in the supply chain rather than monitors of it, the evidentiary basis for prosecution becomes deeply complicated.

The Malvani outcome, four convictions from 106 deaths after nine years, is the legal system operating correctly within its evidentiary constraints. The problem is the constraints themselves: a prosecution framework built around individual criminal liability applied to a distributed, semi-institutional supply chain.

India has all the laws it needs to address illicit liquor. State prohibition acts, the Poison Act, murder and culpable homicide provisions, excise regulations, and inter-state transport permits. The architecture of prohibition and regulation is extensive.

What is absent is the coordination layer that would make that architecture coherent. Methanol crosses state lines under a permit system that different state excise departments administer differently, with no central tracking of diversion risk. Enforcement after tragedies works backwards from casualties rather than prospectively through supply chains. Convictions concentrate at the retail end while the upstream infrastructure that makes each tragedy possible remains largely intact.

Recurrent incidents point toward the necessity for robust national legislation coordinating with state laws to regulate the methanol supply chain effectively, and toward the importance of prioritising regulation and separation of methanol and ethanol supplies.

That argument has been made after every major tragedy. The Punjab Excise Minister made it in a formal letter to the Union government in 2025. After Malvani in 2015. After Kallakurichi in 2024, where investigators found evidence that methanol had been procured separately and distributed across a region with a long history of illicit alcohol production, suggesting its use was not a one-time occurrence.

The victims of these tragedies are poor daily-wage earners drawn by the price of illicit liquor, at the far end of a supply chain where a bootlegger is only the last-mile operator. The supply chain that reaches them runs through industrial procurement networks, across state lines, through complicit enforcement, and into communities where the price of legal alcohol has been set so high that the alternative, however dangerous, remains rational.

Until the methanol supply chain is tracked as a matter of routine rather than reconstructed after a disaster, and until the prosecution framework can reach the distribution network rather than only its retail terminus, each crackdown will produce the same result as every previous one: a few arrests, some suspensions, and the same supply chain waiting for the next batch.

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Anas Ahmad Tak