Indian police confirmed that 56 people have died as a result of a batch of poisonous bootleg alcohol in India, while 117 more people were still in hospitals recovering from the fatal beverage. 

Hundreds of people in the southern Tamil Nadu state's Kallakurichi region last week ingested a batch of locally produced "arrack" that had been tainted with methanol. 

Top district police official Rajat Chaturvedi relayed to AFP that "56 people have died so far and around 117 people are currently under medical treatment."

Approximately 40% of alcohol in the country is illegally produced, part of the almost five billion liters of alcohol people consume every year, according to the International Spirits and Wine Association of India. The reason why it is toxic is that it contains methanol as a way to increase its potency, which if consumed, can cause blindness, liver damage, and death.    

Although cheap alcohol produced at suspicious distilleries kills hundreds of people in India each year, this incident is one of the worst in recent years.

In April last year, toxic alcohol killed at least 27 people in Bihar, India, where alcohol is prohibited, with unverified estimates placing the death toll at 40. 

In December 2022, 37 people were killed after consuming toxic alcohol in Saran, and in a similar incident in July, 42 people died in the state of Gujarat after drinking bootleg alcohol. Likewise in 2021, around 100 people died in the state of Punjab for the same reason.