Jatland cops saved over 70k liquor bottles for decades

For a whopping nearly 22-years, security personnel in Haryana were deployed on guard duty not to protect law and order but to safeguard over 70,000 liquor bottles stocked in a big storeroom.

These several thousands of liquor bottles and another few lakhs of liquor pouches were confiscated during the era of liquor prohibition in the late nineties in Jatland. Policemen pointlessly kept guarding the liquor stock for decades now.

Ironically, the administrative apparatus in successive regimes in power slept over the issue. They failed to realize the futility of draining resources by guarding this humongous stock of liquor. Last week, sanity finally prevailed after over two decades and the police in Haryana’s Rohtak finally destroyed every piece of bottle. The premises were freed of unending rounds of sentry duty.

Haphazardly bundled in building, a JCB machine had to be pressed into action to destroy this massive stock of forgotten liquor bottles after labour failed to deliver owing to the unbearable stench oozing out of the premises. Interestingly, not only did the police pointlessly deployed guards to secure these liquor bottles over the decades, sources said, a huge rental too has accrued and is now pending to be paid.

Haryana was under a regime of total liquor prohibition when Chandhary Bansi Lal was the chief of the state from 1996 onward. These bottles were confiscated and stored between 1996 and 1999 from organized gangs involved in smuggling of liquor into Haryana during those days.
Ever since then the confiscated stock has been dumped and secured by the men in Khakhi. Police chiefs in the district overlooked the wastage of police manpower and money on protection of the confiscated liquor. Only recently, the incumbent police chief Rahul Sharma, while taking stock of the police manpower deployment in the district came across the headcount deployed at the premises where the stock of liquor was kept. Rahul Sharma said this liquor was being secured for decades in the premises. Orders were procured from the concerned court to execute the process of destruction of these bottles.