New Delhi, Jul 17 (TNN): The dancing girls will be back in the beer bars of Mumbai, with the Supreme Court on Tuesday upholding Bombay high court's verdict to junk Maharashtra government's decision to banish them from the city's famous night life.

Though the state government can put curbs on dance bars to prevent obscenity if it so wishes, the order is seen as a setback to Maharashtra home minister R R Patil, who pursued the ban virtually as a personal mission, and will be cheered by many who saw the ban as overzealous moral policing.

A bench of Chief Justice Altamas Kabir and justice S S Nijjar said the state government's 2005 decision to amend the Bombay Police Act and impose a complete ban girls dancing in bars in the name of ensuring safety of women and curbing obscenity was an overreaction, which reflected lack of thinking to search for viable alternatives, and resulted in large-scale joblessness among women.

"The restrictions in the nature of prohibition cannot be said to be reasonable, inasmuch as there could be several lesser alternatives available which would have been adequate to ensure safety of women than to completely prohibit dance. In fact, a large number of imaginative alternative steps could be taken instead of completely prohibiting dancing, if the real concern of the state is the safety of women," Nijjar said, authoring the main judgment.

Agreeing with him, Kabir said the expression "the cure is worse than the disease" came to mind immediately as many dance girls who lost their livelihood because of the complete ban on dance bars had been forced into prostitution.

"The state has to provide alternative means of support and shelter to persons engaged in such trades or professions, some of whom are trafficked from different parts of the country and have nowhere to go or earn a living after coming out of their unfortunate circumstances," the CJI said, while suggested putting in place a "strong and effective support system" for them.

Rejecting the state government's appeal against the 2006 judgment of the high court, the court said instead of a complete ban on dance girls in pubs and bars, the state could consider the alternative suggestions made by a state-appointed committee like banning dance girls from exposing body or wearing tight and provocative clothes during performances.

The committee had also suggested keeping customers in the pubs and bars away from the dance girls by erecting railings around the dance floor which should be a minimum of 10x12 feet accommodating a maximum eight dancers, no showering of money by customers on dancers and a register maintaining the name of each dance girl engaged at the bar.

The court said the state promulgated the 2005 ban on dance girls despite the fact that no authority was asked to take steps to implement the suggestions of the committee and urged the government that "it would be more appropriate to bring about measures which would ensure the safety and improve the working conditions of the persons working as bar girls".

"The discontinuance of bar dancing in establishments below the rank of three star establishments has led to the closure of a large number of establishments, which has resulted in loss of employment for about 75,000 women employed in the dance bars in various capacities," Kabir said.

"In fact, as has also been commented upon by my brother (Nijjar), many of these unfortunate people were forced into prostitution merely to survive, as they had no other means of survival," the CJI said, describing that the closed dance bars presented a Hobson's choice to the girls who lost employment.

"From the material placed before us and the statistics shown, it is apparent that many of the bar dancers have no other option as they have no other skills, with which they could earn a living. Though some of the women engaged in bar dancing may be doing so as a matter of choice, not very many women would willingly resort to bar dancing as a profession," the CJI said.