After multiple attempts of Bollywood and several leaders to encourage voters to come out and exercise their franchise on the day of voting, now the excise department has got a new idea to spread awareness specially among the Tribals of poll-bound Madhya Pradesh. The excise department has decided to mix booze with voters’ awareness in Jhabua.
However, the controversy following this decision of District Collector to put stickers on the bottles of alcohol lead to scrap the idea. The excise department had planned to put on 2 lakh stickers on liquor bottles through dealers with a message in tribal dialects related to awareness on exercising of the franchise. Unfortunately, somehow, liquor dealers put on the stickers in a way that the statutory warning inscribed on the bottles got hidden. This led to a controversy.
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People got annoyed after the news of District Collector’s attempt went viral on local social media where it got trolled. The fear of misinterpretation of the effort led to call off the attempt. People started to believe that this could motivate candidates to distribute liquor to vote. Following the criticism, both the excise department and the District Administrative department decided to take down the idea.
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“2 lakh stickers were to be pasted on liquor bottles following district collector Ashish Saxena’s directive. Saxena said questions should be directed to excise officials. Later, he called off the stickers and ask the dept to remove it from the bottles,” said the district excise officer Abhishek Tiwari.
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“There may be a lot of reasons behind the idea to fix sticker on liquor bottle with voting awareness messages. But now I have asked the excise department to remove the stickers from liquor bottles. For election awareness, we have painted walls of over 2 lakh houses with such messages. We will paste these kinds of stickers on Ration cards too,” said Jhabua Collector, Ashish Saxena.
