Newly elected Delhi Chief Minister Rekha Gupta tabled the CAG (Comptroller and Auditor General) report in an ongoing assembly on February 25, which noted that the Delhi government is suffering an accumulative loss of 2000 crore (USD 242.42 million) due to the weak policy framework by the past government in 2021-22.
According to the report, the recent head of the state presented an audit review in which she claimed the Aam Aadmi Party government led by Arvind Kejriwal tampered with policy formulation. The AAP government implemented the liquor policy on November 17, 2021, but it was scrapped at the end of September 2022 due to corruption allegations. But AAP denies the accusations.
The investigating agencies have mentioned that the profit margins of the wholesalers were increased from 5 percent to 12 percent under the new policy. But this has resulted in cartelization as ineligible people were benefited for monetary favor. The CAG report ensured that the past government knew about the policy recommendation made by the panel, but the team led by then-deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia ignored panel suggestions, resulting in a violation of excise policy.
“The excise department suffered a loss of approximately Rs 890 crore on account of license fees from these zones owing to their surrender and failure of the department in re-tendering,” the report added.
There are millions of losses waived during the covid pandemic by the government. Even they knew the whole rivalry that was happening in the state. At that time, the government was expected to provide a license for vendors to start liquor shops in non-conforming areas, but vendors started their services.
Even the excise department did not take interest in the time. As many of the vendors surrendered their licenses before the policy expired in 2022, that claims more than 900 crore in losses. The report says that no tendering process was initiated by the excise department to operationalize the retail vend. Consequently, no license fees were collected from these vendors in the month of surrender. Notably, the administration faced huge losses in that financial year.
