Game for a breathalyser test at noon in Mangalore?

Happy hours in cities are attracting lot of takers. Come noon and people step into happening pubs in urban locales and order and huge quantity of alcohol. The number has seen a steady increase in the past few years.
“This is not a new trend. But of late, I find customers not finding place to place to sit in the afternoons. My inventory indicates that my restaurant is doing much better in the afternoon than at nights” said Rathnakar Shetty, owner of a chain of wine taverns in Mangalore.
This was not an isolated case. The various liquor lounges were full to the brim in the afternoons, particularly between 11.30 am and 2.30 pm.
Sudhir Raj, a lounge owner in the posh locality of Balmatta, said: “Although the services at my lounge are expensive, ever since I introduced the tap beer, the afternoons have become lively.”
Meanwhile in Bangalore, various pubs on Residency Road, Church Street, Koramangala, Jayanagar and Majestic have been reporting increase in liquor consumption during the afternoon.
Mallesh Gowda, a liquor store owner near Vellara Junction, said: “I open my store at 10 am and I see customers already eager to get in. But I do not serve them till 11am, which is the business hour as directed by the excise department. But I find that afternoon customers are fast drinkers. They take their quota and are gone after a quick drink. Most of them are college students or techies.”
A bar tender at one of the posh pubs confided that the happy hours (starts at 11 am and goes up till 5pm) were also the happy hours for cash registers. Customers binge on 100-120 barrels (each barrel is 50 litres) per day and 50% of this is sold during the happy hours.
Police are not happy as day-time drinking and driving is more dangerous than drunk driving during night.
“Our intelligence has information about the menace of drunk driving during the day. In fact, I am putting a team together to curb this menace. I have received eight new sets of breath analysers for Mangalore and I will ask my men to start using them to bring down drunk driving during the day,” said Seemanth Kumar Singh, commissioner of police. But Bangalore may not launch a drive against the day-time drunk driving.
“The traffic condition is so tight that a hold-up will result in bad traffic snarls. Day-time breath analysis may not be possible in the city; however, our night time drive against drunk driving has been yielding terrific results, as we’ve booked 62,000 cases in 2011-12. We have already crossed 6,000 cases this year,” said MA Saleem, additional police commissioner (traffic) Bangalore.