" A Matter of Chance" continues .....

Emboldened by the lack of oversight by government officials, the lottery operators adopted a more depraved method: they printed and sold only forged tickets. When the draws were conducted, the numbers used were of another series, which had been approved by the government lottery department. So the numbers of the tickets sold were not used in the draw at all.

That meant the buyers had zero chance of winning and all the proceeds of the ticket sales went directly into the pockets of the operators.
An even more diabolical way of cheating lottery ticket buyers was to interchange the results of two lotteries, thereby denying prizes to legitimate prizewinners. This method of cheating came to light, as narrated earlier in this chapter, when the results of Jeevan Rekha and Vijay Rekha were deliberately interchanged. Here again, the organizers conveniently pocketed all sale proceeds.

By adopting these tactics, the lottery operators
denied disbursement of prizes, especially prizes of higher denominations, to any genuine ticket holder.

On 31 May 1993, four lottery operators from Delhi were returning from Kohima in a private taxi when the insurgent group, People’s Liberation Army (PLA) of Manipur, gunned them down. The PLA had warned the Manipur government of direct action against lottery operators if the government failed to ban them. The PLA felt, and perhaps rightly so, that innocent Manipuri people had been cheated by non-Manipuri private lottery organizers for several years. Their
contention was that while lakhs of people from Manipur had bought lottery tickets, not a single Manipuri had ever received a prize because of fraud in the conduct of lotteries.

The PLA had urged the Manipur government to stop lottery trade in their state. However, when after several warnings the state government did not take any action, they resorted to this killing. Criminal incidents related to the lottery trade occurred in different parts of the country from time to time. In some cases, lottery operators resorted to killing fellow operators out of professional rivalry and in turf wars. In others, lottery ticket buyers, having lost their hard-earned money, committed suicide.

To be continued ......