NEW DELHI: Soon, there will be no liquor shops on national and state highways. On Wednesday, the Supreme Court reserved its order but made it clear that it would ban liquor vends on highways.A bench of Chief Justice T S Thakur and Justices D Y Chandrachud and L N Rao repeatedly said it would ensure that the menace of drunken driving on highways came to an end while dealing with a PIL by NGO ‘Arrive Safe’, which said 1.42 lakh people died annually in road accidents, many of them caused by drunken driving. The NGO had said proximity and accessibility of liquor vends on highways was a major reason for drunken driving.Lawyers appearing for Puducherry, Punjab, Haryana and liquor merchants’ associations pleaded that licences to run liquor vends were given as per rules and there should not be any sudden change causing huge loss to the exchequer.What startled the bench was the number of these vends on highways. On a stretch of 1km of national highway passing through Mahe (Puducherry), which links two parts of Kerala where bars have been banned, there are as many as 64 liquor vends, which translates to a liquor vend every 15 metres. Mahe has a population of just 42,000.