A Rule Meant to Save Lives From Spurious Liquor Was Struck Down for Failing to Prevent Exactly That

Article 19(1)(g) Doesn't Ask "Is the Goal Good?" It Asks "Does the Rule Actually Work?" Article 19(1)(g) protects the right to carry on any trade or business, subject to "reasonable restrictions" under Article 19(6). The word doing all the work in that phrase is "reasonable"

• and the Supreme Court's methanol ruling shows exactly how much weight that single word can carry, even when the restriction pursues an undeniably legitimate aim.

The Court Never Disputed the Goal Maharashtra's Rules

18A and 18B existed because of a real tragedy: the 1991 Mumbai hooch deaths that killed roughly 93 people. Preventing methanol-laced spurious liquor from killing people again is, on its face, exactly the kind of "reasonable restriction" Article 19(6) contemplates.

The Court agreed the aim was legitimate. What it found unconstitutional was the mechanism - because Article 14's non-arbitrariness requirement and Article 19(1)(g)'s reasonableness standard both demand more than good intentions; they demand that a restriction actually connect to the harm it claims to prevent.

Where Puttaswamy's Test Did the Real Work

The four-pronged proportionality test from K.S. Puttaswamy (2017)

• legitimate aim, rational nexus, necessity and balancing - gave the Court a precise tool to separate intention from effect. The rule failed at the second prong: rational nexus. Verifying a Form A licence before a methanol sale, as Rule 18A(1) required, told the state nothing about what the buyer would actually do with the chemical afterward. And denaturing methanol sold to legitimate industrial users, as Rule 18A(2) mandated, did nothing to stop diversion happening in what the Court called "the unregulated field"
• the illicit liquor trade the rules never actually touched. The judgment's own words are precise on this: "the sub-rule even in the best case of full compliance cannot prevent the misuse it aims to prevent." A rule that fails even under its own best-case scenario has no rational nexus to its stated aim, however sincere that aim was.

Why This Matters Beyond Methanol This is not a

ruling about chemicals - it's a ruling about how India's courts test regulatory design. A state cannot defend a restriction on Article 19(1)(g) grounds merely by pointing to a legitimate underlying problem; it must show the specific mechanism chosen actually addresses that problem, not just imposes cost on regulated industries while leaving the real harm untouched.

For any future regulation - environmental, industrial, digital - this same proportionality lens will now apply: legitimate aim is necessary but never sufficient. For the exam, the sharp takeaway isn't "the Court protected industry over public safety." It's that the Court distinguished between a policy that looks protective and one that is actually effective - and only struck down the former.