Operation Red Rose:
In 2020, Punjab’s Excise Department launched Operation Red Rose to curb illicit liquor trading and nail excise-related crimes.
- A year-and-a-half later, with the use of precise tracking and monitoring systems to check illicit distillation and smuggling of liquor, the results in terms of the number of suspects booked for crimes, convictions and rise in revenues are encouraging.
- The department has used several technologies — flow meters in bottling plants, QR code-based passes, GPS-enabled transport vehicles, and e-transit passes — to curb different modules of excise theft, which include direct supply of liquor from the manufacturing unit without paying excise duty; liquor smuggling from neighbouring States etc.
- The entire manufacturing process of liquor in the State is now online, which is monitored in real-time
