Relatives mourning the deaths of family members in a suspected hooch tragedy in East Champaran last week.
| Photo Credit: file photo
A Class 4 student in Begusarai’s Siswa returned home from school in a drunken state on Monday. The student was found to have consumed illicit liquor stored in a dilapidated toilet of the school, from where police seized 23 cartons containing 204 litres of illicit liquor.
The incident comes nearly a week after a suspected hooch tragedy in Motihari in East Champaran district, in which at least nine persons were reported dead while many remain gravely ill.
Family members of the student noticed something was amiss when he returned home disoriented. “My nephew was unable to walk properly and was blabbering. His friends told us that he had consumed liquor stacked in huge quantities in the school toilet,” said the student’s uncle.
His family members reached the school and informed the principal, who inspected the toilet located behind the school building and discovered several cartons of liquor.
The principal called the police, who seized the liquor bottles. They have registered a case against unknown persons and launched an investigation.
“The involvement of someone from the village cannot be ruled out. We have registered a case and will nab those involved soon. It’s a very serious issue as to how the illegal liquor reached the government school toilet structure and was stacked there”, said a police officer posted at the Bachhwara police station, requesting anonymity.
10 years of prohibition
Bihar was declared a dry State on April 5, 2016, with a ban on the manufacture, sale and consumption of liquor. However, illicit liquor continued to be smuggled in the State through neighbouring States and Nepal with which Bihar shares a porous border, amid reports of “home delivery” of liquor and recovery of empty bottles from clogged drains of Patna.
Following the incident, Leader of the Opposition in the Assembly Tejashwi Yadav of the Rashtriya Janata Dal alleged that over 11,000 litres of spurious liquor on an average is seized daily in Bihar, adding that the prohibition policy had resulted in “institutional corruption worth of ₹40,000 crore”.
In a social media post on Monday, Mr. Yadav said: “In Bihar, prohibition has become a joke. The law has failed to achieve its purpose due to an alliance between the government and the liquor mafia.”
After the strict liquor laws were enforced in the State, as many as 11 lakh cases have been registered and 16 lakh people arrested. Over 5 crore litres of liquor have been seized, of which 2 crore litres have been recovered in the past five years, and more than 350 people have died in hooch incidents in different parts of the State.
Recently, the police seized illicit liquor and alcohol in tetra packs from inside watermelons, rooftops of railway coaches and vegetable and grain sacks stacked watertight in delivery vans, inside ambulances, bus-truck tyres and even in empty LPG cylinders.
Published – April 08, 2026 01:13 am IST
