The Home Ministry on Friday lifted its earlier ban on liquor shops as the nationwide lockdown was extended to two weeks starting May 4. The ongoing lockdown to contain Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) started on March 24 midnight and was scheduled to end on May 3.<\/p>\n
In the order, it has been mentioned that \u201cconsumption of liquor, paan<\/em>, gutka<\/em>, tobacco etc. in public places is not allowed.\u201d But the order also mentioned that \u201cShops selling liquor, paan, gutka, tobacco etc. will ensure minimum six feet distance (2 gaz ki doori) from each other and also ensure that not more than 5 persons are present at one time at the shop.\u201d<\/p>\n All social distancing norms as per Ministry guidelines have to be maintained along with the use of face-mask in public.<\/p>\n The decision is expected to bring relief to the states as excise duty on alcohol is one of the biggest sources of revenue for many states. With the lockdown in place, all economic activities have been suspended for a long time, leading to a financial crunch at a time when the states are badly in need of funds to fight COVID-19 crisis. Some states had said that the ban resulted in illegal activities like illicit distilling and brewing of alcohol.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Social distancing rules must be maintained.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":279,"featured_media":9413,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[246,346,371,32],"tmauthors":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-9412","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nation","8":"tag-coronavirus-in-india","9":"tag-coronavirus-in-kolkata","10":"tag-lockdown-in-india","11":"tag-national-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9412","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/279"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9412"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9412\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9413"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9412"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9412"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9412"},{"taxonomy":"tmauthors","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tmauthors?post=9412"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}