Ganjam admn seizes bottles of expired beer in pre-puja raids

BERHAMPUR: Ahead of the Dussehra festival, the Ganjam administration on Thursday seized huge quantities of expired beer from different foreign liquor shops in the Silk City.
The liquor outlets were raided following complaints by locals that they were selling beer past the sell-by date. Excise personnel were involved in the raids that continued till the evening of Thursday, sources said.
“During our raids, we seized several bottles of expired beer from the outlets. The beer had expired eight to nine months ago. On some bottle labels, we could not find the dates of manufacture and expiry,” said Sweta Kumar Dash, sub-divisional disaster management magistrate, who led the raids. He said they also seized blank labels at some outlets.
The raids were conducted after Dash, pretending to be a customer, purchased beer from an outlet and found that it had expired four months ago. The government has allowed liquor vends to sell beer that is out of date by a maximum of three months, but only if the content is found fit for consumption after being chemically tested at the depot of the Odisha State Beverage Corporation.
The government allowed this after liquor traders urged it to either buy back the beer stock that had expired during the lockdown or replace it with fresh stock. This was done to provide relief to the outlets that could not sell their stock during the first months of the lockdown.
However, many outlets have taken advantage of this and are now getting rid of old beer without any chemical testing, Dash said. Since some liquor outlets were found to have blank labels, officials fear that the liquor traders may even be selling adulterated liquor. There are 65 liquor outlets in Berhampur.