Source : INDIA TODAY NEWS
On June 18, Bihar’s prohibition machinery seemed to be everywhere at once. In Gopalganj, excise officials seized 135 litres of foreign liquor from a car. In Patna, two separate interceptions yielded 240 litres of beer and another 172 litres of foreign liquor.
In Jamui, officials stopped a pick-up vehicle carrying 1,331 litres of foreign liquor and arrested one person. Katihar reported the seizure of 101 litres of foreign liquor and three arrests, while in Gaya, officials recovered 96 litres of beer and took one person into custody. Saran added another 52 litres of foreign liquor to the day’s tally.
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The pattern was unmistakable. A state that has spent a decade trying to choke off the supply of alcohol was still hunting consignments across highways, village roads and border routes. The seizures stretched from district to district, involving everything from private vehicles to commercial carriers. Ten years after Bihar imposed total prohibition, the trade remains stubbornly alive, adapting to every crackdown and exploiting every gap in enforcement. Bihar may be a dry state as per law. In practice, it remains remarkably wet.
That is the central paradox of prohibition in Bihar. The policy has not ended the trade so much as driven it underground, where it has become more evasive, more inventive and, at times, more dangerous. The state can point to a formidable enforcement record: raids, arrests, seizures, confiscations, border posts and constant surveillance. What it cannot point to, at least not convincingly, is the disappearance of liquor from everyday life. The market survives. The demand survives. The risk survives.
The scale of the cat-and-mouse chase is itself revealing. From Bhagalpur in the east to Buxar in the west, from Nawada in the south to the twin Champarans in the north, prohibition has turned Bihar into a permanent enforcement zone. Smugglers have responded with equal ingenuity. Over the years, excise officials and police have recovered liquor from mortuary vans, milk tankers, ambulances, postal carriers, vegetable trucks, scooters and bicycles.
Bottles have been found hidden beneath false flooring, behind fabricated panels, inside modified fuel tanks and in specially designed chassis compartments. Every interception seems to produce a new concealment method. Every crackdown triggers a fresh adaptation. The profits are simply too attractive for the trade to fold.
The ban began in April 2016 when Bihar imposed total prohibition with the moral certainty of a crusade and the administrative confidence of a reform. It was sold as a response to a cluster of social wounds: domestic violence, household distress, public disorder, wasted wages and the wider damage alcohol had long caused in parts of the state. The message was clear and forceful. Bihar would no longer tolerate the visible sale and consumption of alcohol. Ten years on, the law remains intact. Its consequences, however, are far more complicated than its advocates imagined.
The latest household data offers an uncomfortable reality check. The National Family Health Survey-6 (NFHS-6), conducted in 2023-24, estimates that 16.5 per cent of men aged 15 and above in Bihar still consume alcohol, up from 15.4 per cent in NFHS-5 (2019-21). Rural Bihar stands higher at 17.1 per cent while urban Bihar is at 12.8 per cent. Among women, the figure is 0.4 per cent. These are not the numbers of a habit vanquished, rather of a habit that has adapted to the ban, changed its routes and, in many cases, gone further underground.
The enforcement response has been immense. Since prohibition came into force, Bihar has registered more than 1 million cases, arrested over 1.6 million people, seized around 45 million litres of liquor and confiscated about 160,000 vehicles. It has expanded excise districts, intensified border policing and turned the state’s edges into an enforcement belt. Drones, boats, scanners, breath analysers and check-posts have become part of the landscape.
And yet the sheer size of the crackdown also exposes the scale of the problem. A policy that requires this much effort has not solved the problem it was meant to cure. It has simply created a more exhausting version of the same struggle. Every seizure is a victory of sorts, but every seizure is also proof that the supply chain is still alive. Every arrest signals pressure on the trade, but also confirms that the risk still pays for those who move liquor through Bihar’s highways, river routes and village lanes. The June 18 seizures made that point more vividly than any policy paper could.
The social logic of prohibition remains harder to dismiss than its enforcement record. The ban still carries moral power in Bihar, especially among women voters and families that associate alcohol with domestic neglect, violence and debt. For many supporters, the state’s refusal to soften its line is not a sign of stubbornness but seriousness. It suggests a government willing to intervene in private behaviour in the name of public discipline. That moral argument is not trivial. It is one reason the policy survives even as its enforcement becomes more obviously Sisyphean.
There are practical obstacles, too. Bihar is bordered by Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand and West Bengal, all of them states where alcohol flows freely. To the north lies an even greater challenge: an 800-km-long border with Nepal, a porous line dotted with villages where people cross daily to trade, pray and, if they wish, drink. Total sealing is practically impossible. A ban imposed within one state cannot fully withstand such geography.
But moral symbolism cannot erase fiscal reality. Before prohibition, liquor brought significant excise revenue into Bihar’s coffers. Once the ban arrived, that stream collapsed. The state gained a symbolic reform and lost a large and visible source of income. In its place came a costly enforcement architecture that must be maintained year after year. Bihar effectively traded a tax base for a policing burden. That burden now spills into the courts, where prohibition cases crowd dockets, drive bail hearings and keep the justice system busy with a steady flow of minor and major offenders alike.
What makes the picture more troubling still is the shift in the wider substance-abuse landscape. Bihar has seen rising concern over codeine-based cough syrups, ganja, opium and other narcotics. The enforcement focus may have begun with liquor, but it now stretches into a broader narcotics network. That does not mean prohibition caused this shift on its own. It does mean the ban has not contained the culture of intoxicants; it has merely redistributed it.
This is the deepest contradiction of the Bihar model. It was designed to reduce harm, but it has often increased risk. Illegal liquor is harder to regulate and far more dangerous when consumed. Hooch tragedies are the sharpest expression of that reality. When alcohol goes underground, adulteration becomes easier, quality control disappears and the consumer bears the full cost of secrecy. The deaths in East Champaran in April were a reminder.
The politics of prohibition is also shifting. Bihar’s prohibition, excise and registration minister Madan Sahni recently defended the ban as a social reform measure rooted in former chief minister Nitish Kumar’s moral conviction. He said the government was reviewing implementation and plugging gaps wherever they emerged, and that cases should be registered not only against those caught within Bihar but also against traders and suppliers outside the state. Yet Sahni has also publicly complained that enforcement is being undermined by a police-machinery not doing enough. That duality captures the mood of the moment: the state is not abandoning prohibition, but it is no longer speaking about it with the old certainty.
Seen against the backdrop of the change of chief minister, that shift matters. The Samrat Choudhary government has kept the ban in place, but the zeal around it appears to have cooled. The likely reason is practical: after years of struggle, there is a growing recognition that the ban is not working in the way its architects hoped. Sahni’s remarks suggest a government more interested in tightening enforcement than in celebrating the policy as a success.
Ten years on, Bihar’s prohibition story is not a simple verdict for or against. It is a layered account of political will, social aspiration, bureaucratic overreach and market resilience. The state says it has seized millions of litres of liquor, arrested hundreds of thousands of people and built a wall of enforcement. The market responds with a new vehicle, a new route, a new concealment method, a new intoxicant. Bihar is dry in law, wet at the borders, relentless in enforcement and stubbornly alive to the trade it sought to end. That is prohibition at 10: a daily war without a decisive victory, and a ban that has lasted long enough to become part of the problem it was meant to solve.
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SOURCE :- TIMES OF INDIA
