Finally the restaurants and bars in Delhi can stay up through the night and you sure can party all night long. Delhi government’s proposed excise policy for the year 2015-16 aims at encouraging more and more restaurants located in seven star as well as five-star hotels to run round-the-clock. This will aid tourism and enhance the restaurant business, giving the capital’s nightlife a facelift. This policy will come into effect only with Cabinet approval and procuring a 24-hour license under this policy will enable the restaurants to run all night. Bars in five-star and seven-star hotels, as well as many others in motels in Paharganj, Shahpur Jat and Chandni Chowk get the opportunity to earn huge money.
The policy does away with the prerequisites for a 24-hour excise license, to serve alcohol in restaurants, such as a tourism license, police registration and fire clearance along with slashing down the fee. The 24-hour license was not too popular earlier as it attracted annual fee of Rs 40 lakh for restaurants that were above five stars but now it has been proposed to slash down the fees by 45-60 percent.
The closing time for restaurants and bars is 1 am however many restraints had approached the excise department seeking a four hour extension license but the excise department thought it would be better to make the 24-hour license more feasible for restaurant and hotel owners. The excise department has also proposed to relax various conditions for procuring this permission and the tourism license issued to restaurants, mandatory for procuring a liquor license was immediately done away with.
All of this has been done since the conditions mentioned and the process that has been followed caused unnecessary trouble to the restaurant owners and served no tangible benefits of regulation for the government. This initiative is being taken in order to improve the ease of doing business in Delhi and for the same purpose restrictive licenses would be removed immediately. Maybe ‘Ache din aane wale hai’
