Tarapith: Tarapith, one of the most famous abodes of goddess Kali in Bengal, clocked a record six lakh footfall last weekend but the talking point in the temple town is the spike in liquor sales to Rs 2.6 crore - eight times the normal.
The 400-odd hotels in the Birbhum pilgrim centre were packed to capacity over the weekend that coincided with the Kaushiki Amavasya festival.
Tarapith hosts around 8,500 visitors daily on average and 15,000 during weekends. The number last weekend was six lakh, 2.5 lakh of them from Bihar alone, according to the temple committee. The sale of liquor on each of the two days was over eight times the daily average of Rs 15 lakh, said excise officials.
Excise officials and residents have linked the spike in the sale of alcohol to the high footfall. There are 16 shops that sell alcohol in and around Tarapith.
"We had to keep our shop open till midnight because of long queues of buyers. In Indian-made foreign liquor (IMFL) alone, we sold alcohol worth over Rs 40 lakh in the two days," said an owner of an off-shop in the town.
Hotel owners said bookings from Bihar contributed to at least 40 per cent of the occupancy in the town, 220km from Calcutta. Police sources said many of the visitors also came from Jharkhand, besides Bengal. "We have 180 rooms. Around 80 were booked by guests from Bihar," said Sunil Giri, the manager of Hotel Sonar Bangla, a prominent hotel in Tarapith.
A senior police official said the footfall was the highest in five years, according to initial estimates as Kaushiki Amavasya - which falls during the dark fortnight of the Bhadra month in the Bengali calendar - fell on a weekend this time.
Excise officials said the sale of liquor was twice that of last year. "This year, 25,266 litres of IMFL, 9,095 litres of beer and 14,232 litres of country liquor were sold in Tarapith during Kaushiki Amavasya. This is a record," Suhriday Roy, the district excise collector, told The Telegraph.
Another senior excise official linked the spike to prohibition in Bihar. "We were surprised when we got the first reports of liquor sales. Later, we detected the huge footfall from Bihar, which has been a dry state since April 2016," the official said.
Taramoy Mukherjee, president of the Taramata Sebayet Samity which manages the temple, spoke of a "conspicuous surge" in the number of pilgrims from Bihar after it was declared a dry state. "This time, of the six lakh people, at least 2.5 lakh were from Bihar," said Mukherjee.