₹115 of your ₹140 quarter is tax: TASMAC's price, split open

The bottle we split

Old Chef Deluxe Brandy, 180 ml, ₹140 — the ordinary-grade quarter that tops the state's sales by value on our leaderboard more days than not. Nothing about the maths below is special to it; it is just the most honest bottle to pick, because more of Tamil Nadu buys it than anything else.

Tax one: the counter

Under the Second Schedule of the Tamil Nadu VAT Act, spirits sold at the second point of sale — the TASMAC counter — carry VAT at 220%, plus a 2% additional tax on the same turnover. The printed price already contains it, so the split is pure back-calculation: ₹140 is the base times 3.22, which makes the base ₹43.5 and the VAT ₹96.5 — 68.9% of the price — collected the moment the bottle crosses the counter.

Tax two: the still

Before the bottle ever reaches a shop, the distillery remits excise duty per proof litre. For ordinary-grade spirits the published rate is ₹140 per proof litre. A 180 ml quarter at the standard 42.8% strength is 0.135 proof litres — ₹18.90 a bottle, another 13.5% of the printed price.

Counter VAT plus still excise: ₹115.40 of ₹140 — 82.4% — from just the two levies whose rates are printed in the state's own duty structure.

Tax three: the one you can't quite see

There is a third levy underneath: VAT at 58% on the first sale, when the distillery invoices TASMAC. Its rupee value per bottle depends on the distillery's invoice price, which is not published per brand — so we will not pretend to know it. What we can say is where it lives: inside that last ₹24.60. Whatever the invoice price is, 58% of it goes to the state too, which pushes the true tax share of a quarter past 82% and toward the mid-80s. The liquid, the bottle it came in, and every margin in the chain share what remains.

A TASMAC shop is not really a liquor store with taxes on top. It is a tax counter that hands you a bottle as a receipt.

Beer is taxed backwards

Beer flips the structure: harder at the counter, lighter at the brewery. The retail-point VAT on beer is 260% — a bigger bite than spirits — while its excise is ₹10 per bulk litre, a fraction of the spirits rate. On the state's best-selling beer, a ₹170 Fosters 650 ml, the counter takes ₹123.04 (72.4%) and the brewery duty adds just ₹6.50 (3.8%).

Wine sits at 250% and draught beer at 270% at the counter — every category lives in the same neighbourhood. There is no lightly-taxed door into a TASMAC shop.

What this looks like at state scale

Across the 3,953 shops we tracked yesterday, our stock-movement estimate put the day's sales at roughly ₹126 crore. Apply the published-levy share and something like ₹100 crore of that was tax — in one ordinary Monday. That is the real answer to why the price of a quarter never goes down: it is not a price, it is a revenue line.

How this was worked out

The rates are TASMAC's own published excise-duty-and-VAT structure and the Second Schedule of the TN VAT Act, 2006: VAT of 220% on spirits, 250% on wine, 260% on beer and 270% on draught beer at the second point of sale, plus the 2% additional tax on second-point turnover in force since April 2016; 58% VAT at the first point; excise duty of ₹140–210 per proof litre for spirits, ₹10 per bulk litre for beer and ₹7 for wine. Proof-litre conversion assumes the standard 42.8% v/v strength of Indian-made spirits. MRPs are from our live 1,498-product catalogue, and the statewide ₹/day figure is an estimate derived from stock movement, not receipts. What is not published anywhere — distillery invoice prices, so the exact rupee value of the first-sale VAT, and the distillery/TASMAC margin split — we have left as ranges rather than invented.

₹140 on the label. ₹115.40 of it in the state's column before anyone else is paid a rupee — and a third tax underneath that only makes the split sharper.