Tragic death of an eight-year-old after consuming 330 ml of Scotch whiskey.
By Rajiv Theodore
NEW DELHI: The recent tragic death of an eight-year-old boy after drinking Scotch whiskey in Kerala has once again riveted attention on this sliver of a state in southern India where insobriety is a raging problem.
The boy didn’t guzzle 330 ml of the brew because he was a tippler. His father, a laborer by profession, had received a bottle of Scotch from a friend. He had kept it away in a cupboard, which the boy ferreted out, and consumed a deadly portion of it.
Despite the tragedy being an unwitting incident, the fact remains that scores of others are dying and being rendered incapacitated, many of them in their highly productive age groups, all due to sheer dipsomania in the state.
Call it the bane of Kerala, the state known for its high human development index, is leading the country in the number of liters of alcohol being gulped down which is nearly nine per person on a yearly basis.
The figures are much less since the consumption of alcohol is often under-reported and a copious amount of home-made brews like toddy and arrack are also consumed. And it is a familiar talk amongst binge drinkers in northern Kerala to take a trip to nearby Mahe or Mayyazhi, since the booze there is available without taxes, is much cheaper because of the region’s unique status as a Union Territory. And for the records, Kerala’s closest cousin as far as drinking goes is Punjab in distant north where about eight liters per person are consumed annually.
Serpentine queues in front of liquor shops are now getting longer by the day in Kerala. Anyone who has lived in the state cannot ignore these single men and under-aged boys with mundus or dhotis tucked up to their knees, awaiting their turn patiently to buy liquor at shanty pigeon-hole vendors in the state. A regular stream of motorcycles, scooters and auto-rickshaws bring in more customers as the day wears off and one wonders the single-minded devotion and love the natives have for Bacchus.
The latest figures provided by the Kerala State Beverages Corporation (KSBC), which supplies the most popular Indian Made Foreign Liquor (IMFL), show that the overall sales jumped from Rs. 7,860 crore in 2011-12 to a record Rs 8,841 crore in 2012-13. The state government which controls the booze sales, in the process, collected a cool Rs 7,251 crore.
Among the drinks, rum is the all-time favorite of the Keralites, with 55% sales of the total liquor consumption in the state, followed by brandy and vodka. Gin, whiskey and wine together account for just one per cent of the spirits used, according to sales data. As far as beer is concerned, recently a new record was broken with sales crossing one crore cases to reach 1.02 crore cases, up from 0.98 crore cases in fiscal 2011-12.
Kerala once was also known for another record: it topped in the number of suicide cases in the country, and the blame went naturally to alcohol. But weirdly, the suicide rate has come down but drinking has hit a record high. It is attributed mainly to higher wages, increase in foreign remittances, increasing urbanization and break-down of joint family system. Churches blame it on easy access and government’s soft-pedaling on the issue.
The government on its part has raised prices and legal age for drinking, reduced the timing of bars and empowered local bodies to take a call on opening liquor vends in their regions. But as of now the resounding ‘’let’s have a small’’, the euphemism for an invitation for binge drinking, seems to be getting louder and louder in God’s own country.
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