In what has become a shocking piece of news for boozers in the Nilgiris district of Tamil Nadu, the district administration has on Thursday said that the liquor will be sold in the state-owned TASMAC outlets only for those who had received the Covid-19 vaccine.

Vaccination has become crucial weaponry to beat the Covid-19 pandemic and to encourage the people and to mitigate their hesitancy towards the vaccines, several countries have been rolling out measures including offers and freebies to the people to invite them to the vaccination camps. India is one of the countries that was heavily devastated by the horrendous second wave of the pandemic and several Indian states had announced free rations and several offers to get the people to receive the vaccine doses.

Some of the establishments had threatened to cut the salaries for the employees in a way of coercing them to get vaccinated. In line with that, the Nilgiris district has announced that alcohol will be sold in the TASMAC only for those who had taken the vaccine. Nilgiris district collector Innocent Divya has said that people in the Nilgiris should have received at least the first dose of the vaccine to get liquor from the TASMAC outlets.

The district administration has also mandated that the boozers must have Aadhaar cards. The order of alcohol-for-vaccine has come at a high time when Tamil Nadu is getting back to the pre-Covid-world with the state government ramping up the measures to cover all the eligible people under vaccinations. As the schools and colleges are reopened in the state on September 1, the government has directed the teachers and all the staff members to receive the first dose of vaccine before entering the premises.

So far, Tamil Nadu has administered over 2 crore vaccine doses and recently, the state has recorded the single-day peak by administering over 5 lakh shots in a day. According to the state health department, Tamil Nadu has reported 1,509 fresh cases, 1,719 discharges, and 20 deaths on Wednesday. Overall, the state had recorded 26,16,381 cases so far as of Wednesday of which 16,620 are active, 25,64,820 have been discharged, and 34,941 had succumbed to the viral infection.