The baffling incident that has made headlines involves the raid conducted by the Hyderabad Excise Department on an unlawful business of selling whiskey-soaked ice cream. The incident occurred at Ariko Cafe Ice Cream Parlour along roads 1 and 5 in the city’s Jubilee Hills environs. In an operation conducted on the basis of a tip-off, the department retrieved 23 containers of whiskey-flavored ice cream, which weighed in at about 11.5 kg, and arrested several persons involved in the crime, officials said on Friday.
The parlor was run by Sharath Chandra Reddy, who added 60 ml of whiskey and the same amount of brandy to each kilogram of ice cream and sold it to customers at a high price. The whiskey-infused ice cream on sale was establishing itself as a novelty product by using social media, particularly Facebook, as its promotional platform. Two other people, Dayakar Reddy and Shobhan, were arrested for extending the product’s consumer base by preaching about its benefits.
The excise department has lodged a complaint against the accused, and investigations are being carried out for the legal proceedings and to know the actual extent of the illegal activity and whether other people were involved in it or not. This strange finding has, therefore, called for a debate on people’s ill-legal buying and indulging in alcoholic products within the public domain.
In another operation, the Hyderabad Excise Department confiscated non-duty-paid liquor that was valued at ₹3.85 lakh on Thursday. The accused, Gopal Agrawal from Attapur, was caught transporting the liquor from Chandigarh with a clear intention of making more profits by selling it at very high prices in Hyderabad. He had at first bought the alcohol for ₹1.32 lakh and was planning to sell it for rupees four lakh, so he was getting a handsome amount of Profit.
In both cases, the authorities have again brought out the difficulty of stopping the illicit sale of alcohol in the region.
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