Punjab’s Operation Red Rose unfurls to curb illicit liquor trade

Precise tracking systems and administrative coordination are behind the Excise Department’s successes

In 2020, Punjab’s Excise Department launched ‘Operation Red Rose’ to curb illicit liquor trading and nail excise-related crimes. A year-and-a-half later, with the use of precise tracking and monitoring systems to check illicit distillation and smuggling of liquor, the results in terms of the number of suspects booked for crimes, as well convictions and a rise in revenues, are encouraging.

In December 2020, the department busted an illegal bottling plant at Rajpura in Patiala district using Global Positioning System (GPS) technology. It has been made compulsory for transporters of extra neutral alcohol (ENA) and spirits to install GPS systems in their vehicles. A control room at the department’s head office in Mohali keeps a tab on the movement of all vehicles round the clock. On December 12, the control room flagged a tanker carrying 20,000 litres of ENA that had started from a distillery from Patiala but halted near Rajpura for an unusually long period of time. A squad of local officials was rushed to the spot, which found that ENA was being siphoned off from the tanker to an illegal bottling plant. A huge cache of liquor, blends, empty bottles and unused caps were also recovered, and a case was subsequently registered. This is one among several cases that the department has busted by deploying the latest technology.