Busting Liquor with Vigour

Busting Liquor with Vigour (Pouring out the Wicked Liquid with Faith and Force)
Spurious liquor had no place to hide when women from tribal lineage, lower castes and minority religions came together to rid the village of this evil. All of them being Tanishka Forum members and heartened by local media support they nailed their village headman and had their police inspector run to their rescue.

KRA
Illicit country liquor was ‘flushed out’ of this hamlet by women demolishing the 4 kilns; all armed with a proposal passed by the whole village.

Spurious liquor can reach furious levels of societal decay. This truth that was lived by Vikharni village. A village with a population of 4000 had 4 illicit liqour kilns, where spurious liqour was distilled and distributed as a brisk business. The women of that village had men return home penniless to beat them up and a sizeable part of their daily wages going into such acidic addiction. There was hardly any money left to educate their children or feed their infants.

Domestic violence vented itself as positive resistance and the tide began to turn. The fight against liqour began in 2011, but gained ground in 2013. Led by Sumanbai, the women of Vikharni first enrolled themselves as Tanishka Forum members. Finally, when the village head – himself an addict – refused to entertain their plea, they locked him up at the village headquarters. Things reached a peak when even the police was accused of petty bribes in exchange of ignoring the liqour trade.

As the heat went up and a proposal was tabled by the Tanishka Forum members at the village general body meeting, where the police sub inspector (PSI) was herself present. With the proposal passed, the woman soon marched to demolish these acid quarters. In fact, wives of two of those kiln owners supported the proposal and refused to shop for raw material or distribute hooch anymore. While two families joined state-run employment schemes, the other two families shut shop and had to leave this dry land!