Controversy dogged the government’s preparations to resume the sale of legal liquor through ‘Bev Q’, a mobile app for virtual queue management, at least by Thursday.
Leader of the Opposition Ramesh Chennithala on Tuesday released ‘documents’ which he claimed proved that the government had favoured an ‘inexperienced firm’ with political links to the leadership of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) to build a smartphone application for purchasing liquor from State-run retail outlets, bars, and beer and wine parlours.
Mr. Chennithala said the firm stood to make 50 paise for every order placed through the application. When the sale of legal alcohol commenced, the start-up is predicted to rake up a minimum of ₹3 crore in monthly profit. Moreover, it stood to profit from annual maintenance contract, training of government employees to manage the application and processing charge for liquor orders placed as SMS text messages.
He said the government had by-passed IT proficient public sector entities such as C-DIT and National Informatics Centre (NIC) to favour the start-up.
Meanwhile, the government denied Mr. Chennithala's allegations. It said the 50 paise charged for every liquor purchase order was to underwrite the charges slapped on the firm by cloud service providers, companies that generated QR codes and mobile phone service providers.
The charge is only for customers who purchased liquor from bars, and beer and wine parlours. It did not apply to those who purchased alcohol from Bevco outlets.
The mobile application is on trial for a possible launch on Thursday.
Kerala was also studying Jharkhand’s decision to experiment with food delivery companies to deliver alcohol in cities. It had earlier rejected the option.
