The Supreme Court set aside the concurrent findings of a single judge and a division bench of Kerala High Court that said the Kerala government could not abandon its promise to absorb the arrack workers rendered jobless by the 1996 ban on the liquor in the state. But the apex court bench of Justices L. Nageswara Rao and Hemant Gupta disagreed that the workers’ right of appointment under the government promise had “matured into a right to life” and also stressed that fundamental rights were subject to reasonable restrictions. Some 12,500 abkari workers (liquor industry workers) had lost their livelihood after Kerala banned arrack on April 1, 1996. The aggrieved abkari workers challenged this, alleging discrimination against the surviving workers whose options had now been closed. A single-judge high court bench in May 2015 ordered the state government to stick to the 2002 policy.

Source: The Telegraph October 10, 2019 21:22 UTC