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Govt’s profits mount as God’s Own Country gambles happily
A half-naked, sweat-soaked coconut tree-climber climbs down the last tree of the day to be welcomed into the palatial interiors of an S-Class Benz by a uniformed chauffeur. A farm worker takes a dip in a pond after a day’s work and comes up in the sparkling pool of a deluxe hotel to be offered a towel by a beautiful waitress in bikini.
These sequences, used to show how magically Luck transforms one’s life overnight, are from TV ads for Kerala Government’s Thiruvonam Bumper Lottery offering Rs 5 crore and a kilo of gold as first prize. Lotteries – legalized gambling as critics call it – are magic for the Government. Its revenue from lotteries grew from Rs 557 crore in 2010-11 to Rs 1,287 crore last fiscal.
Not a single day passes in Kerala without at least one draw of the State-run lotteries. The Government’s Department of Lotteries is running seven different lotteries every week (Pratheeksha, Dhanasree, Win-Win, Akshaya, Bhagyanidhi, Karunya and Pournami) with each day seeing one draw. The four to six bumper issues a year are additional.
It could create an impression that people of God’s Own Country with the highest literacy rate and social indicators in the country are relying on luck and gambling for money and success instead of depending on hard work to make a decent living. Many sociologists say that such criticisms are not unfounded.
The Keralites’ passion for lotteries refused to evolve into despair when legal cases were fought furiously in the High Court over the smuggling out of over Rs 80,000 crore till early last year by operators of lotteries from outside the State, a scandal in which leaders from both the ruling and Opposition sides were alleged to have equal involvement.
Instead, that scandal turned out to be a blessing for the State Government which used it as an opportunity to launch the one-lottery-a-day business to satisfy the passion for gambling of the Keralite. Top sources in the State Lotteries directorate now say they are confident that the revenue could soar to around Rs 2,500 crore this fiscal from last year’s Rs 1,287 crore.
“It doesn’t surprise me,” says V Somakumar, a Kochi-based sociology researcher. “In a State which has nothing left to sell other than land, soil and sand and has no real industrial production, earnings have to come from the unreal. The logical parallel is liquor, whose sales increase in Kerala every year by close to 30 percent. Soaring crime rates also show that,” he points out.
Last year, the Government had sold 30 lakh tickets of the Thiruvonam Bumper Lottery while the target fixed for this year is 42 lakh tickets while the ceiling is 54 lakhs. As on Monday, 33 lakh tickets of the bumper had been sold through over 100,000 retail vendors under 35,000 authorized agents. The sale of tickets is to close on Friday.
The Government had entered into lottery business in 1967 when the first prize was Rs 50,000 and ticket price Re 1.00. The price of a Thiruvonam Bumper ticket now is Rs 200 which makes it the highest priced lottery ticket in entire India. “But ticket price is no problem. Fortune-seekers don’t care if the prize structure is attractive,” said a senior Lotteries Department official.
Gambling’s basis could be in the unreal but the money the prize brings is indeed tangibly real. Abdul Lathif, a restaurant worker who won last year’s the Thiruvonam Bumper, is now a happy man after starting a very prospective business with a part of that money. It is not for nothing he was made the central figure in some of the commercials for this year’s Thiruvonam Bumper.
A half-naked, sweat-soaked coconut tree-climber climbs down the last tree of the day to be welcomed into the palatial interiors of an S-Class Benz by a uniformed chauffeur. A farm worker takes a dip in a pond after a day’s work and comes up in the sparkling pool of a deluxe hotel to be offered a towel by a beautiful waitress in bikini.
These sequences, used to show how magically Luck transforms one’s life overnight, are from TV ads for Kerala Government’s Thiruvonam Bumper Lottery offering Rs 5 crore and a kilo of gold as first prize. Lotteries – legalized gambling as critics call it – are magic for the Government. Its revenue from lotteries grew from Rs 557 crore in 2010-11 to Rs 1,287 crore last fiscal.
Not a single day passes in Kerala without at least one draw of the State-run lotteries. The Government’s Department of Lotteries is running seven different lotteries every week (Pratheeksha, Dhanasree, Win-Win, Akshaya, Bhagyanidhi, Karunya and Pournami) with each day seeing one draw. The four to six bumper issues a year are additional.
It could create an impression that people of God’s Own Country with the highest literacy rate and social indicators in the country are relying on luck and gambling for money and success instead of depending on hard work to make a decent living. Many sociologists say that such criticisms are not unfounded.
The Keralites’ passion for lotteries refused to evolve into despair when legal cases were fought furiously in the High Court over the smuggling out of over Rs 80,000 crore till early last year by operators of lotteries from outside the State, a scandal in which leaders from both the ruling and Opposition sides were alleged to have equal involvement.
Instead, that scandal turned out to be a blessing for the State Government which used it as an opportunity to launch the one-lottery-a-day business to satisfy the passion for gambling of the Keralite. Top sources in the State Lotteries directorate now say they are confident that the revenue could soar to around Rs 2,500 crore this fiscal from last year’s Rs 1,287 crore.
“It doesn’t surprise me,” says V Somakumar, a Kochi-based sociology researcher. “In a State which has nothing left to sell other than land, soil and sand and has no real industrial production, earnings have to come from the unreal. The logical parallel is liquor, whose sales increase in Kerala every year by close to 30 percent. Soaring crime rates also show that,” he points out.
Last year, the Government had sold 30 lakh tickets of the Thiruvonam Bumper Lottery while the target fixed for this year is 42 lakh tickets while the ceiling is 54 lakhs. As on Monday, 33 lakh tickets of the bumper had been sold through over 100,000 retail vendors under 35,000 authorized agents. The sale of tickets is to close on Friday.
The Government had entered into lottery business in 1967 when the first prize was Rs 50,000 and ticket price Re 1.00. The price of a Thiruvonam Bumper ticket now is Rs 200 which makes it the highest priced lottery ticket in entire India. “But ticket price is no problem. Fortune-seekers don’t care if the prize structure is attractive,” said a senior Lotteries Department official.
Gambling’s basis could be in the unreal but the money the prize brings is indeed tangibly real. Abdul Lathif, a restaurant worker who won last year’s the Thiruvonam Bumper, is now a happy man after starting a very prospective business with a part of that money. It is not for nothing he was made the central figure in some of the commercials for this year’s Thiruvonam Bumper.
