Maharashtra govt may revive 7-y-old plan to track all liquor bottles with holograms

Plan was first mooted under Devendra Fadnavis-led BJP govt in 2016, but dropped due to fears of tender process favouring major players & doubts about the technology.

Representational photo of a wine shop at Shivaji Park in Mumbai | ANI

Mumbai: The Eknath Shinde-led government in Maharashtra has brought back a seven-year-old proposal to track the movement of each liquor bottle in the state to ensure it has the necessary approvals and the manufacturer has paid the required duties on it, ThePrint has learnt.

The state excise department had first taken up the project for implementation in 2016 under then chief minister Devendra Fadnavis’s government, but had scrapped it fearing that the tender process could give undue advantage to major players in the packaging industry. Some officials had also expressed concerns over whether the technology would actually be effective. 

According to a senior official from the state excise department, this ‘track and trace model’ — as the department is calling it — will involve a hologram. 

The end consumer will be able to track the legitimacy of a liquor bottle by simply scanning the hologram through a mobile application to check details such as the date and place of manufacture, when it reached the distillery, and when it was cleared for marketing and placed on the shelves, the official said. 

ThePrint reached Milind Mhaiskar, additional chief secretary, excise, for comment via calls and text message. This report will be updated when a response is received.

But the official quoted earlier said that states such as Uttar Pradesh and Telangana had already introduced some version of such a ‘track and trace’ system. 

“With this model, all bottles will have a hologram that can’t be tampered with or replaced. The hologram will have all details of testing, duties paid and approvals for that particular bottle. It is a move to eliminate spurious liquor and duty evasion,” the official said. 

Proposal first mooted in 2016

State excise department officials say that the proposal to put a hologram on every liquor bottle was first mooted in 2016 when the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) Fadnavis was the chief minister. The department had also issued a tender to implement the project in 2016. 

However, the tender was scrapped after Eknath Khadse, then the excise minister, was dropped from the cabinet following a controversy over the purchase of an industrial plot by his family. 

Khadse is now a leader of the Nationalist Congress Party, which is part of the Maha Vikas Aghadi alliance.

The senior official quoted above said that back then, there were concerns that the tender conditions could mean that the “players in charge of implementing the system will end up making considerable money looking at the size of the liquor industry in Maharashtra”. 

The state excise department earned Rs 21,550 crore in revenue in the previous 2022-23 fiscal year, according to data from the department. 

In 2019, the state government was considering introducing a barcode system to help establish the authenticity of liquor bottles. But nothing further came out of this. Meanwhile, a new government under Uddhav Thackeray was sworn in in November 2019. 

(Edited by Uttara Ramaswamy)