INDORE: The excise department will invite e-tenders for 33 liquor shops out of total 177 in the district after the existing contractors showed disinterest in renewing their licence due to poor sale."The department will invite tenders for 18 country-made liquor shops and 15 Indian made foreign liquor shops since the existing contractors showed disinterest in renewing the licence for next one year and it also failed to find new owners in the lottery system held recently," assistant excise commissioner, Indore, Sanjeev Kumar Dubey told TOI.As per the state government's policy for the fiscal year 2017-18, reserved price of all the liquor shops has been increased to 15 per cent.The government had chalked out plans to renew existing liquor licence before holding a lottery system and then inviting e-tender to give all the liquor shops on a contract of one year. On January 24, the authority had given a week-long time to submit the liquor licence renewal applications after as per the condition; the local office successfully achieved its 70 per cent target. It generated Rs 490 crore as revenue generated through all kind of liquor licence fees and penalties recovered in the current financial year.Officials are now hopeful to achieve the annual target of Rs 701 crore by March 31 since the department has managed to generate 82.20 percent of the revenue by Friday In the first stage, the contractors approached the department for renewing licence of 89 country-made and 52 Indian-made foreign liquor shops.On February 1, the department invited applications for issuing licence against the remaining 37 liquor shops through lottery-system. In this process, only one country-made and two Indian-made foreign liquor shops found new owners."We have invited e-tenders for remaining 33 liquor shops. The interested persons/groups have been asked to submit their applications between February 14 and 22" said Dubey. All the e-tenders, received on or above the reserved price for the liquor shops, will be sent to the district collector for awarding the licence to the highest bidder and those e-tenders falling below the reserved price will be sent to the state government, which will take decision on them, he added.

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