Chhattisgarh’s Excise Department collected Rs 10,145.65 crore in 2024-25, nearly double what it earned just three years earlier, and is on track to better that figure this fiscal, with Rs 7,861.72 crore already in the kitty up to December of 2025-26. Departmental records furnished under the Right to Information Act further show that the State has generated a cumulative Rs 38,331.63 crore in excise revenue between 2021-22 and December of 2025-26. Behind this steadily swelling revenue stream, however, lies a set of questions the department has chosen not to answer on enforcement raids, liquor seizures, criminal cases, de-addiction spending and chronic staff shortages, all turned away on a procedural technicality. The revenue trajectory itself, drawn from the department’s own records furnished in response to an RTI application, is statistically clear. From Rs 5,110.15 crore in 2021-22, collections climbed to Rs 6,783.61 crore in 2022-23, then to Rs 8,430.50 crore in 2023-24 and Rs 10,145.65 crore in 2024-25. The department has already collected Rs 7,861.72 crore up to December in the ongoing financial year 2025-26. Yet the one figure that would allow citizens to judge this performance against the State Government’s own expectations, the annual revenue target, is conspicuously absent from the response.

 

Without it, there is no way to determine whether the department exceeded, met or fell short of its stated objectives. The disclosures emerged from an RTI application filed by Nagpur-based RTI activist and President of the Association of Social and RTI Activists (ASRA), Sanjay Thul, who had sought a broader set of information relating not only to revenue collections but also enforcement activity, retail expansion, de-addiction initiatives and manpower availability within the Excise Department. The retail architecture underpinning this revenue has also shifted markedly. Conventional country-liquor shops have fallen from 211 in 2021-22 to 123 in 2025-26, and foreign liquor outlets from 304 to 167. In their place, composite shops stocking both categories have nearly tripled from 126 to 355, while premium outlets have more than doubled from 21 to 44.

 

The overall shop count has barely moved from 662 to 689, before a separate district-wise tally places the figure at 703 for 2026-27, with Raipur (79), Bilaspur (67) and Durg (64) accounting for the largest numbers. A footnote to that tally additionally lists specialised licences operational in 2025-26, including 13 FL-2A, six FL-3A, two FL-3B, five FL-3C, five FL-4, 32 FL-4A and four FL-6 licences, which do not appear in the department’s principal shop-count table. It is on the enforcement side, though, that the silence is loudest. Excise-related court cases rose from 16,875 in 2021-22 to a peak of 25,474 in 2024-25, before easing to 21,408 up to December of 2025-26. That single trend line is all the public is permitted to see. Questions on the number of raids conducted against illegal brewing and smuggling, the quantity of illicit liquor seized, FIRs registered under the Excise Act, and details of operational distilleries and bottling plants were all declined. So too were queries relating to expenditure on the “Nav-Bharat” de-addiction programme and vacancies among excise inspectors, sub-inspectors and constables.

 

The reluctance to disclose enforcement-related information has raised eyebrows among transparency activists and observers, particularly against the backdrop of the alleged Rs 3,200-crore liquor scam in Chhattisgarh. The matter is being probed by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), Enforcement Directorate (ED) and the State Economic Offences Investigation and Anti-Corruption Bureau (SEOIACB), resulting in multiple FIRs, Enforcement Case Information Reports (ECIRs), arrests and provisional attachment orders (PAOs) over the past several years. Investigating agencies have alleged large-scale irregularities in the liquor trade and distribution network, while SEOIACB has also registered Disproportionate Assets (DA) cases against certain accused persons. In such a context, activists argue that withholding data on excise raids, liquor seizures, prosecutions, de-addiction expenditure and departmental vacancies only deepens concerns about transparency and public accountability in a sector that has become one of the State’s largest revenue generators. The department’s refusal rests on a 2009 gazette notification confining RTI applications to a single subject within 150 words. Citing this provision, Public Information Officer Nidhish Kumar Koshti asked the applicant to refile separate applications for each of the declined queries, a procedural route that, for now, leaves the enforcement and accountability side of Chhattisgarh’s booming liquor economy effectively undisclosed.