pubs

bars

excise department

Vaibhav

Indiranagar

The old-fangled law that shuts downandat 11.30 pm got rebooted this weekend withofficials ordering the city’s watering holes against keeping their doors open till 1 am. The directive turned out to be a double-whammy: while young revellers cursed authorities for spoiling their parties, pub owners cribbed about loss of revenues.Miffed at being ordered to wind up their party on Friday night,R, a reveller called up Bangalore Mirror asking why the government was going back on the 1 am deadline for Fridays and Saturdays when everything was going cool.“Do they want us to sit at home and drink next week onwards? Why is the government so low on the cool-quotient?”Vaibhav and his five friends were all set to party till 1 am at a pub on100 Foot Road on Friday night. But they were asked to get out at 11.30 pm itself.Not just in Indiranagar, a majority of liquor joints in the central business district also chose to stick to the 11.30 pm deadline fearing action.A pub owner on MG Road, who did not want to be identified, said: “We were told by excise officials that there is no formal order from the government to allow for extension of business hours to 1 am, so we have to follow rules and close business at 11:30 pm on Friday and Saturday.”The state government had scored brownie points among the city’s young crowd (especially those working in tech companies) in June 2014 when it relaxed the ban for a year by allowing pubs and bars to remain operational till 1 am during weekends . In June this year, the government extended the relaxation for a month. But with no formal order coming from the government, excise officials decided to go by the rule book this weekend and clamp down on nightlife.A senior excise department official said: “We are yet to get a clear directive from the government in this regard. The extension of timings was allowed till June this year. However, it was extended up to July. But since we have not got any clearance from the finance department we told waterholes that they have to abide by the rules – that is shutting doors by 11.30 pm.”The official, who did not want to be named, said the finance department’s approval was mandatory since extension of timings pertained to business. However, sources maintained that the issue had been put on the backburner by the finance department.National Restaurants Association of India (Bengaluru chapter) head Ashish Kothare told BM: “The city police had given a no-objection certificate on July 23 for extension of nightlife, the excise department should have also endorsed it.” He appealed to the government to approve the extension of deadline at the earliest.“While business would be in the range of 30-70 per cent from Mondays to Thursdays it used to be 100 per cent on weekends,” Kothare said.The directive has also affected autorickshaw drivers and cabs besides affecting revenue flow to the exchequer.