At least 28 people have died and 60 others became ill from drinking altered liquor in western India, officials said Tuesday.
Senior government official Mukesh Parmar said the deaths occurred in Ahmedabad and Botad districts of Gujarat state, where manufacturing, sale and consumption of liquor are prohibited. It was not immediately known what chemical was used to alter the liquor.
Ashish Gupta, Gujarat state’s police chief, said several suspected bootleggers who were involved in selling the spiked alcohol have been detained.
Deaths from illegally brewed alcohol are common in India, where illicit liquor is cheap and often spiked with chemicals such as pesticides to increase potency.
Illicit liquor has also become a hugely profitable industry across India where bootleggers pay no taxes and sell enormous quantities of their product to the poor at a cheap rate.
In 2020, at least 120 people died after drinking tainted liquor in India’s northern Punjab state.
According to a report, The deaths occurred in the Ahmedabad and Botad districts of Gujarat state, where the manufacture, sale and consumption of alcohol is prohibited.
‘There was 98 percent methanol in the liquor they consumed, that means they had consumed methanol only which has increased the death toll,’ Bhavnagar Ashok Yadav, inspector general of police, told The Times of India.
The Ahmedabad city crime department has arrested a chemical owner Jayesh Khavadiya from Narol and his eight accomplices over suspected bootlegging.
The death toll is expected to increase further after several patients arrived in Ahmedabad civil hospital for treatment.
The Gujarat province has banned alcohol consumption since 1960 as a homage to Mahatma Gandhi, killed in 1948, but hundreds of residents have died across the decades as the illegal liquor trade sprung up.
Illicit liquor has also become a hugely profitable industry across India where bootleggers pay no taxes and sell enormous quantities of their product to the poor at a cheap rate.
Local police regularly turn a blind eye to the liquor trade as bootleggers pay bribes to carry out their illicit selling in the villages, local Indian media reported.
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Dhandhuka MLA Rajesh Gohil had also written to the authorities seeking action against bootleggers in the area.
‘There is rampant bootlegging of liquor thanks to the nexus of bootleggers and the police and patronage provided by the BJP leaders in the state,’ said senior Congress legislator Amit Chavda, according to The Hindu, adding: ‘Police regularly take monthly bribes from the bootleggers.’
In 2019, at least 133 people died after drinking tainted liquor in two separate incidents in India’s northeast Assam state.
The victims were mostly tea plantation workers. That same year, another 80 people died from tainted liquor in northern Uttar Pradesh state.
In 2020, another 120 people died after drinking spiked alcohol in India’s northern Punjab state.
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