BANGALORE, India – Venkateshwarappa, a shepherd on the edges of the city, found small plastic bags of it tossed in the bushes. It was moonshine, it was Sunday afternoon, he felt lucky, and drank it.
Muhammed Amin, a house painter, bought two bags because it was cheap. Seenappa, a migrant bricklayer among the armies of construction workers in this booming software capital, drank it because it was the only brew on offer in his slum that day.
Tuesday evening, they lay in a government hospital called Bowring, lucky to be alive. The poison hooch has killed at least 110 people in recent days. The vast majority of the dead came from slums in Bangalore – India’s outsourcing capital – but several dozen deaths also were reported in nearby rural areas and across the state border in neighboring Tamil Nadu.
Even by Indian standards, where dozens of people are regularly killed in road accidents, terror attacks and even on windy days, when feeble roofs and walls collapse, the death toll was unusually high.
The episode was as much an indictment of India’s public health system as a window into the danger of illegal liquor among India’s poorest classes. In a city sprouting several new state-of-the-art private hospitals, the bulk of these victims ended up at the mercy of poorly equipped government hospitals.
Harish, a doctor at Bowring Hospital, the main facility tending to the victims, said he could have saved “up to 50 percent” of those who died, if he had had access to a ventilator and dialysis machine. The hospital has neither.
The “hooch deaths” as they are being called here come a year after the government prohibited the sale of country liquor, called arrack, arguing that it was ruinous to the poor, but left untouched other kinds of alcohol. Since then, plastic bags of illegal brew turn up from time to time in the city’s poorest neighborhoods.
At the hospital, Harish was not even in a position to do a proper blood test on Venkateshwarappa. As he lay struggling to breathe, his brother-in-law, Ramappa, was told to hail an auto-rickshaw, and ferry his blood sample to the nearest private hospital for an arterial blood gas analysis.
Before Ramappa ran out the door, he whispered another piece of awful news. Venkateshwarappa’s wife also had found some bags of liquor in the bushes, helped herself to some, and died earlier in the day. He had not yet broken the news to Venkateshwarappa.
R. Srikumar, the state police chief, said the liquor was spiked with camphor and tobacco and was suspected to have contained toxic methyl alcohol.
