The File Says the Ban Failed. The Data Disagrees With the File.

Whose Liberty, Whose Harm

Imagine you are the official whose recommendation will decide whether Bihar's alcohol ban stays or goes. On your desk sits a report arguing the ban failed to reduce violence against women and cost the state significant revenue.

You also have access to peer-reviewed, quasi-experimental research, the closest thing public health has to a controlled trial when nobody can ethically randomise who lives under prohibition, showing the ban prevented an estimated 21 lakh cases of intimate partner violence and 18 lakh cases of obesity among men.

You cannot treat both as equally credible. Your recommendation depends on which kind of evidence you are willing to trust and that choice is itself an ethical one.

Two Real Duties, Not One Obvious Answer

The case for lifting the ban is not manufactured. A state has a genuine obligation to respect adult citizens' liberty to make their own choices about a legal substance and prohibition is about as hard a form of paternalism as governance gets: it does not nudge, tax or restrict access at the margins, it removes the choice entirely, for everyone, regardless of whether any individual drinker would ever become violent.

Lost excise revenue is real money the state cannot spend on health, education or infrastructure it desperately needs. These are not trivial considerations dressed up to look serious. But the state also has an obligation to prevent serious, documented harm where it has the power to do so and the quasi-experimental evidence here is not marginal.

Twenty-one lakh prevented violence cases is not a statistical curiosity; it represents a specific, identifiable population of women who did not experience violence that the counterfactual evidence suggests they otherwise would have.

Treating hard paternalism as automatically illegitimate, regardless of the harm it prevents, would require pretending that the liberty interest of the drinker always outweighs the safety interest of the person historically harmed by that drinking.

That is not a neutral default; it is itself a value judgment and not obviously the correct one.

The Resolution That Isn't a Coin Flip

The honest answer is not "keep the ban forever" and not "lift it now." It is that continued prohibition remains ethically defensible only for as long as no less restrictive alternative can plausibly deliver comparable protection.

Rationing systems, stronger access controls and expanded de-addiction and public education infrastructure exist precisely because outright bans are not the only tool available and a state that has not seriously built out those alternatives has not yet earned the right to claim prohibition is still the least restrictive option.

My position: Bihar should not lift the ban based on the current report's flawed crime-data reasoning, but it should be given and held to, a clear timeline to build calibrated alternatives, after which continued blanket prohibition would need fresh justification.

That is a real cost too, delayed liberty for adults who would never become violent and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.