Liquour in Telangana set to be costlier
Hyderabad: Cash strapped Telangana State government is eying the excise department to mop up more revenue to improve the funds availability to the schemes and programmes it has contemplated in the past three months.
According to official sources, the government is expecting about Rs 2,000 crores more from the liquor sales in the state per annum by raising the prices of the strong drinks being sold in the state. It might increase the prices of the liquor by 20 per cent from the next excise year, starting from October 1.
Due to the increase, the per month income on the liquor sales would raise by Rs 200 crore taking the monthly revenue to Rs 1,200 crore. With the sale of liquor, Telangana government could earn Rs 12,000 crore per annum and this would rise to Rs 14,000 crores by the hiked prices.
In April and June months of this year the government got a revenue of Rs 1,950 crore from the excise department. The government is in need of more revenue to fund its schemes like crop loan waiver, fee reimbursement, pensions, housing, irrigation and power sectors.
The crop loan waiver scheme alone needs Rs 17,000 crore and housing, irrigation and power need more than Rs 5,000 crore spending to each. The government is struggling with the budget allocations and is searching for more revenue sources.
It has appointed a task force with higher officials to find out more revenue sources and to tap the maximum from the existing ones. The task force members are deliberating on the subject and have suggested some ideas to the government.
One of them is to raise the liquor prices by 20 per cent. The government of the erstwhile combined AP has revised the prices in 2012 and increased the prices from 10 per cent to 90 per cent on various categories and since then the price raise was not touched.
News Posted: 10 September, 2014
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