Man arrested for operating tiffin centre beyond permited time
By Ajay Mallareddy
Telangana’s government wants you to imagine Hyderabad as the next Singapore: a city that never sleeps, open around the clock, alive with commerce past midnight. That vision is sold at investor summits and stamped across the “Telangana Rising” branding and the promise of a 24×7 city.
But what did the same government do to a man who tried to live in that promised city ahead of schedule? He ran a tiffin centre. He was booked for operating beyond permitted hours. A metropolitan magistrate at L.B. Nagar sentenced him to two days’ simple imprisonment and a ₹50 fine under the Hyderabad City Police Act. The police (under the Malkajgiri commissionerate) then posted his photograph beside a uniformed officer, under the caption “Rules Must Be Followed, Public Order Protected,” finished off with celebratory hashtags.
A man who cooked food and sold it to willing customers was put behind bars by the police in Hyderabad for the offence of staying open.
When the post later drew public anger, the police quietly deleted it. Ten days before that arrest, the state showed how it treats late-night business when it feels differently about it. For the FIFA World Cup final, the Telangana government allowed the city’s
bars, clubs and microbreweries, which normally have to shut by midnight on a Sunday, to stay open until 3 a.m. so fans could watch Argentina play Spain.
The government issued the order following a request from the Telangana Bar and Restaurants Owners Association. There is nothing wrong with that. An industry asked for a late-night relaxation, and a responsive government granted it. That is how it should work: if a business wants to trade into the small hours for a big occasion, and no one is harmed, the answer should be yes. The trouble is not that the bars got their extension.
The trouble is what happened to the man who never had a door to knock on.The Chief Minister made no secret of enjoying the moment. Revanth Reddy, who has built much of his public image around being a “die-hard sports and football lover” and the only Chief Minister to have shared a pitch with Lionel Messi, personally announced the extension and told fans to enjoy the final. There was even a flourish.
According to an article published in Siasat.com earlier, bars were told to play a one-minute video of Reddy on the pitch with Messi before kickoff and at halftime, and to send back clips proving they had. The late hours came with a captive audience for the Chief Minister’s showreel. Closing time, it turns out, is negotiable. It just depends who you are.
Staying open late is not inherently a crime. It depends entirely on whether the state has decided to allow it. And the police did not have to prosecute this man. They could have warned him, or told him to shut for the night. They chose to register a case, and then to publicise it.
The tiffin vendor is not the story. He is the opening image. The story is a government that markets a world-class open city while its police jail the very people who would build it, choosing the harshest tools they have against the man with the least standing to answer back, and then calling the result public order. The remedy is not complicated. The government has publicly promised a 24×7 city, and announced plans for zones where businesses may operate around the clock.
That promise is worth keeping. Lift the blanket closing-hour restrictions and the requirement that ordinary lawful businesses seek police permission to stay open. A tiffin centre serving late-shift workers is not a public-order threat to be licensed, inspected and jailed into submission. It is exactly the kind of night-time economy a modern Hyderabad needs. The simplest way to stop jailing people for staying open is to stop treating staying open as an offence.
Where a business genuinely causes harm, real noise, obstruction, unsafe conditions, the state can act against that harm directly, as every functioning city does. What it cannot keep doing is criminalise the clock itself, and then reach for handcuffs when a man with no one to speak for him trips over it.
A city that can stay open until 3 a.m. for a football match can stay open for a man selling tiffin to feed his family. One of them had an industry to ask on his behalf and a Chief Minister glad to oblige. The other had jail. Until that changes, the 24×7 city is a promise the government makes at summits and breaks on the street.
(Ajay Mallareddy is Director of the Centre for Liberty, which has researched and advocated for a genuine 24×7 Night-time Economy in Hyderabad, including an economic report presented to the state government last year estimating that a night-time economy could support over two lakh jobs. CFL proposed letting businesses in designated zones operate by default, rather than
through the case-by-case police permissions at issue here, and has written to the Chief Minister and the police calling for an end to such prosecutions.)
This post was last modified on July 31, 2026 1:29 pm