Village Women Shut Down Liquor Shops Across Indian State

In 1991, a group of women in Dubagunta village walked to their local liquor shop armed with broomsticks, sticks, and chili powder, and forced it to shut down. Most had just learned to read at a night school, and now they were closing the business that was bleeding their families of money and peace.

The numbers told a devastating story. The average family in Andhra Pradesh earned about 1,840 rupees per year but spent 830 rupees on liquor. Meanwhile, the state government collected 812 crore rupees from cheap country liquor called arrack, while villages went without clean water and schools.

The spark came from adult literacy classes that started in January 1990. As women learned to read, they began talking openly about what troubled their homes, and arrack topped the list. Nellore district alone had 864 liquor shops.

Vardhineni Rosamma, an agricultural laborer in her late 60s who had never learned to read, led the Dubagunta women. They first destroyed pots of alcohol after promising to help families who depended on that trade, then ransacked the arrack shop despite police trying to stop them.

Women in neighboring villages joined the fight. The government argued it couldn't close the shops because liquor money funded welfare programs. The women had an answer: they offered to contribute a day's wages instead, proving they wanted solutions, not just complaints.

By 1992, about 50,000 people marched against liquor auctions, and 80% were women. Police attacked the protesters, but the movement kept growing. Women confronted contractors, local officials, and eventually the Chief Minister himself.

The Ripple Effect

The pressure worked. On October 1, 1993, the Chief Minister banned arrack across Andhra Pradesh. When that wasn't enough, women's groups pushed for total prohibition. The next Chief Minister promised it during his 1994 campaign and imposed it just days after taking office.

The total ban lasted 28 months before the next government lifted it in April 1997. But the movement left something more lasting: proof that ordinary women could reshape what happened in their own neighborhoods.

In 2016, women in Rajasthan's Kachabali village campaigned until 94% of voters backed closing their village's only liquor shop. They followed a path that Dubagunta women had cleared 25 years earlier.

Rosamma died in August 2016 at age 93, living her final years in hardship after government land promised to her was taken away. But the woman who couldn't read when she picked up her broomstick had already changed history. Every news report of her death called her Dubagunta Rosamma, giving her village's name to her own.

When women who had just learned their letters decided their families deserved better, they taught an entire state to listen.