A failing ban

A failing ban

As states circumvent its highway liquor ban, SC shows welcome openness to revisiting it.
It has become clear that the Supreme Court judgment pronounced last December barring liquor vends within 500 metres of high ways has failed the test of practicality. Seeking to circumvent this judgment, various states have set in motion a process of denotifying state highways. They are also petitioning the Centre to denotify national highways along certain stretches. This matter reached SC after the Punjab and Haryana high court rejected a petition opposing the Chandigarh administration's decision to denotify highways passing through the city. Now SC appears open to reconsidering its position of December. On Tuesday, it sympathetically observed that the denotified roads in Chandigarh passed through the city “where there is no fast-moving traffic”.
In December SC had conclusively rejected pleas to exclude high ways that pass through cities and towns, noting that such exclusion defied “sense and logic” and would allow drivers to “replenish their stocks of alcohol”. While all state governments are in agreement with SC on the need to curb drunken driving, many of them disagree with its conclusion that liquor sales along highways were the primary culprits. Without seeking a review of the judgment they have proceeded with the seemingly unrelated denotification of highways ¬ an unhealthy development that may hinder the expansion of India's highway network.
SC has preferred not to see such denotification as an affront to its December judgment and has instead linked the categorisation of highways to traffic speed. It's easy to understand why governments and civic bodies are resorting to ingenious ways to circumvent the highway liquor ban. Huge investments that went into setting up hotels, bars and restaurants and procuring licences have been affected, lakhs of jobs lost, and state governments suddenly left without a valuable source of revenue. The tourism sector has been hit big.
There are better ways of addressing accidents caused by drunken driving: first by rigorous patrolling of highways which requires greater allocation by states, followed by faster prosecution of cases by the judiciary and then by strict punishments. Recent amendments to the Motor Vehicles Act increasing penalties for drunken driving help achieve the latter. But the blanket ban along highways that SC envisaged, while well-intentioned, penalises an array of stakeholders not at all engaged in drunken driving. It's actually in the interest of justice that SC should reconsider this ban.