The Supreme Court today asked the central government to explain why lotteries shouldn’t be banned to save the poor from frittering away their meagre earnings in the hope of hitting the jackpot.
The notice came a little over a week after another bench of the court asked Bengal to restrict draws of a lottery to once a week as mandated under a central law instead of one every five minutes.
“Why should the state encourage lottery? It is against the law and the Constitution,” a two-judge bench observed today following an emotional plea of an activist who said his relatives spent money on lotteries and then came “begging” to him for funds.
In his plea in Hindi — the court’s official language is English — Satyavit Singh, who has set up an organisation called All India Lottery Abolition Group, said: “Hamare rishtedar sab paise loota dete hein lottery pe aur hamare pass aa jatein hein udhar ke liye.”
The resident of Najafgarh, New Delhi, said the government robbed the poor in the name of running lotteries. “Sarkar garibon ke nam pe lottery chalake garibon ko aur looti hai,” he told the court.
Singh said the law restricted lotteries to one draw a week but operators circumvented the act by changing the name of the draw. “Haryana mein, naam badl badl ke draw pe draw hota hai,” he said.
In Calcutta, too, lottery operators have been adding a prefix or a suffix to the original name of a draw or even coining a new name to defy the court’s November 27 interim instruction to restrict draws to once a week per game under the Lotteries (Regulation) Act, 1998.