Your favourite beer’s dead?

Benjamin Franklin said beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. But as the summer of 2009 holds Delhi by the collar, lovers of the beverage in the city are feeling a little let down, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Updated on: Apr 29, 2009, 24:11:31 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Benjamin Franklin said beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. But as the summer of 2009 holds Delhi by the collar, lovers of the beverage in the city are feeling a little let down.

Popular foreign brands of beer that are bottled in India have disappeared from shelves and there’s no sign of fresh stocks coming in.

So has the liquor God’s love for Delhi’s beer guzzlers suddenly waned?

Not really.

The fault lies in the failure of the beer companies to renew their licences . Some of the brands that have vanished from the capital are Carlsberg, Cobra and Smirnoff. But Indian brands like Kingfisher and Godfather are available across the city.

Delhi’s Collector, Excise, Sanjeev Ahuja blamed the beer companies for the brands going off the shelf.

“We have clearly told the companies that it will take a month to renew the licences. Some companies submitted their applications at the last moment, which led to this situation,” he said.

The dearth of popular beer brands this summer is a result of the change in excise policy. Till recently, the liquor companies were required to renew their licences for sale of brands before a definite date. But the policy was changed to allow liquor companies to renew their licences at their will provided they fulfilled the new excise policy criteria.

Liquor vends managers say this led to 60-70 per cent of the brands going off the shelves in the first week of April, after companies failed to renew their licence.

“The most hit are the locally bottled foreign brands,” a manager at a Connaught Place liquor vend, who was not willing to be quoted, said.

This has also resulted in some dip in revenue earnings from beer, he added.

With the Delhi government’s excise department suddenly getting licence renewal requests from many companies, there was some delay in awarding new L-1 licenses, an official said.

The good news, however, is that the popular beer brands will be back in Delhi market by first week of May. And beer buffs can finally sip their favourite beer and thank Benjamin Franklin’s god.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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