by aman taneja anirudh rastogiwith more than another week of nationwide lockdown to go and the indian economy continuing to face unprecedented batterings due to businesses being shut for more than amonth the prohibition on the sale of liquor has become a contentious issue keeping practical issues like social distancing and the genuine threat of a correlated rise in domestic violence there are no easy answerskerala meghalaya assam and west bengal had reportedly taken measures during the lockdown to allow the sale of alcohol with varying safeguards such as requiring medical prescriptions and limiting the hours that vends could be opened advt however the home ministrys april 15 notification extending the lockdown put a spanner in the works specifying a strict ban on the sale of liquor in all states areported 1530 of the states revenues some rs 248 lakh crore come from levies on alcoholic beveragesstates having been losing an estimated rs 700 crore a day due to the liquor ban with simultaneous losses on the gst front these lost revenues cant be easy to accept the public health argument with five crore indians reportedly affected by alcohol dependence suggests people suffering from alcohol withdrawal needing to be hospitalisedthere is also the fear of proliferation of spurious liquor keeping all this in mind a total ban on alcohol sales is counterproductive rather permitting online and offline sales with safeguards may be a better optiongiven the relatively inelastic nature of alcohols demand it can be argued that its sale is wellsuited to helping economic recovery until there was strong pushback from offline retailers ecommerce companies were set to resume sales of nonessentials from april 20 in a bid to keep the economic machinery moving why not reverse gois reversal on april 19 of its earlier decision to allow the sale of nonessentials via ecommerce and allow online alcohol sales as well advt over the years many internet startups have tried to venture into the online sale and delivery of alcohol however these efforts were thwarted by state excise departments citing laws that have not caught up to newer business modelsin 2018 there were reports that state governments in maharashtra and karnataka were considering permitting online sale and home delivery of alcohol in an effort to combat drunk driving we are yet to see regulatory changesthis is partly because brickandmortar shops are wary of online competition they pay large sums for excise licences and states too are reluctant to lose this revenue these concerns can be assuaged by allowing online delivery aggregation from the brickandmortar shops and imposing strict territorial limits similar territorial limits have been implemented recently for home delivery of medicines states can recoup lost licence revenue from corresponding increases in online sale licence feesthe reluctance to allow the online sale of alcohol also comes from the risk of selling liquor to those who are underage this can be addressed with online agegating techniques and mandatory agechecks at the point of delivery further to limit