Shankar Mahato felt his vision going hazy the morning after a drink at a local hooch den near his village in India's eastern state of West Bengal. He got cramps and began to shiver, his wife told NDTV television channel. Mahato, a poor mason, was taken to a hospital, first on a bicycle, then on an autorickshaw. But soon after he was admitted, Mahato died.
At least 125 others have also died since Tuesday of alcohol poisoning in West Bengal. All of them come from a group of just a dozen villages in South 24-Parganas district. They were all poor like Mahato. Daily wage manual labourers, rickshaw pullers and hawkers who are now part of the 1,000 and more who die every year in India, victims of a killer industry of illegally brewed alcohol that often contains deadly chemicals.
The business thrives despite laws banning the illegal brew in several states in the country, with shacks mushrooming outside railway and bus stations where poor workers gather to drink the cheap liquor.
Since no taxes are paid, the brew is cheaper than alcohol that is produced with licenses, often costing as little as 10 rupees (about 18 cents) a litre. The liquor is usually brewed in clandestine distilleries and at times adulterated with industrial alcohol, which makes it dangerous. It is sold in plastic pouches or straight from a container in shebeens like the ones dotting the area in South 24-Parganas.
"The outlets just appear overnight at another location when we demolish them," local police official Debabrata Sen said. "In many parts of India, illicit liquor production and marketing is like a cottage industry, with every village having one or two illegal operations," says an article on the website of Asia Pacific Alcohol Policy Alliance (APAPA), a network of non-profits.
Grieving families in villages near Usthi and Magrahat towns which were worst-affected told local television channels there was a tacit agreement between manufacturers and Excise Department and police officials who allow the business to flourish in return for bribes.
Illicit brews have been found with alcohol content as high as 56 percent, according to APAPA. Indian rules permit a maximum concentration of about 42.8 percent alcohol content in Indian-made foreign liquors like whiskey and rum. The hospitals near the affected South 24-Parganas villages can barely cope with the steady flow of patients who have been coming in with symptoms of alcohol poisoning since early Wednesday.
"One person died at 10:30 pm (Tuesday), another at six in the morning. We then realised the alcohol was poisoned and people started to take the ill to the hospitals," a young man interviewed by NDTV television said. "They are still coming in with dead bodies, with critically ill patients," a distraught hospital staff member manning the phone at the state-run Diamond Harbour sub-divisional hospital said by telephone on Thursday afternoon.
The beds were full and television channels showed sick patients sitting almost shoulder-to-shoulder in the cramped corridor of the hospital as they were administered saline drips. Initial post mortem reports of victims showed the presence of industrial methyl alcohol in the viscera. The chemical can cause blindness, spasms and death.
Earlier in December the western Indian state of Gujarat, the only state in India where alcoholic drinks of any kind are prohibited by law, introduced the death penalty for the manufacture and sale of illegally-brewed alcohol. Despite years of prohibition, 136 people died in Gujarat after consuming toxic hooch in 2009 in one of the worst incidents in the country so far. Administrators in Gujarat hope the new law will act as a deterrent for those involved in the illegal alcohol business.