Bihar is dry. On paper, at least. In reality, the state’s prohibition policy is less of a legal wall and more of a lucrative UI skin for a thriving underground logistics network.

Former Chief Minister Jitan Ram Manjhi recently decided to say the quiet part out loud. He’s calling for a crackdown on the smugglers who have turned a state-mandated drought into a premium, door-to-door delivery service. It’s a classic tech story: a legacy system (the government) tries to block a service, and the market responds by building a faster, more expensive, and completely unregulated alternative.

Manjhi’s gripe isn't just that people are drinking. It’s that they’re doing it with the convenience of a Silicon Valley startup. In Bihar, you don’t go to a liquor store; you send a WhatsApp message. You don’t browse shelves; you wait for a guy on a beat-up Hero Splendor to zip through a back alley with a bottle of IMFL (Indian Made Foreign Liquor) wrapped in a newspaper. It’s Uber Eats for the legally forbidden.

The friction here is purely financial. Prohibition hasn't ended consumption; it’s just shifted the profit margins from the state treasury to the pockets of "delivery partners" and their handlers. A bottle of blended scotch that retails for 1,200 rupees in neighboring West Bengal or Uttar Pradesh suddenly commands a 3,000-rupee price tag once it crosses the border into Patna. That’s a 150% "prohibition tax" paid directly to the black market.

The state government has tried to fight back with tech, of course. They’ve deployed drones. They’ve bought motorboats to patrol the Ganges. They’ve talked about using facial recognition and AI-augmented surveillance to spot smugglers. It’s a massive expenditure of public funds to solve a problem that the state created for itself in 2016. But drones can’t see inside a milk tanker or a spare tire. They certainly can’t monitor the thousands of encrypted Telegram groups where the real coordination happens.

Manjhi is pointing out the obvious failure of this high-tech dragnet. The "big fish"—the wholesalers moving truckloads of spirits—are rarely the ones getting caught. Instead, the system nibbles at the edges, arresting the low-level couriers while the infrastructure remains intact. It’s like trying to stop the internet by arresting the guy who delivered your router.

The cynicism here is unavoidable. Every time a government tries to "disrupt" a deeply ingrained human habit through flat-out bans, they end up creating a more resilient, more shadow-bound version of that habit. Bihar’s prohibition wasn't just a moral crusade; it was a massive regulatory pivot that handed a monopoly to anyone brave or corrupt enough to manage a supply chain under pressure.

Now, the "home delivery" model has become so efficient that it’s almost comical. You have a situation where the elderly former CM is effectively complaining about the quality of the state’s firewall. He wants the smugglers stopped, but the smugglers are currently the most reliable logistics providers in the region. They have better uptime than the local power grid.

The conflict isn't just between the law and the lawbreakers. It’s between the reality of human demand and the fantasy of state control. The government is playing a game of Whac-A-Mole with a 150-million-person population, using 20th-century policing tactics against 21st-century decentralized distribution.

There’s a specific irony in the state’s obsession with "smart cities" and digital growth while it remains mired in a prohibition era that Al Capone would have found nostalgic. The drones keep buzzing over the riverbanks, and the police keep flashing their new handheld scanners, but the bottles keep arriving at the doorstep.

Manjhi’s call for action will likely result in another "special drive." There will be some grainy footage of crates being crushed by a steamroller. A few more kids on motorbikes will end up in a crowded jail cell. The price of a bottle in Muzaffarpur might tick up another 500 rupees to cover the increased risk.

But as long as there’s a delta between what the law says and what the people want, the delivery boys will keep riding. You can’t patch a bug that’s actually a core feature of the human condition.

If the state really wants to stop the "home delivery" of liquor, they might want to ask why their own legal and economic systems are so much less efficient than a smuggler with a burner phone.

Who knew that the most successful tech deployment in rural Bihar would be an end-to-end encrypted booze funnel?