"A Matter of Chance" continues....

Interestingly, many media houses came forward in support of the lottery operators as their advertising revenues were being negatively affected by our investigation.

The above-mentioned facts relate to only a handful of cases investigated by the Crime Branch. It would not be incorrect to say that similar frauds existed in all 137 lotteries being run in Delhi, out of which quite a few had daily draws. We estimated that countrywide, around Rs 55,000 crore of people’s money had been swindled in the lottery scam. We arrived at this figure by working backwards after obtaining the aggregate of royalties that the state governments had received from lottery operators. No government agency, no civil society organization, or, for that matter, no section of the media had taken notice of this scam of humongous proportions. The reasons were simple and straightforward. The lottery departments of various state governments, whose responsibility it was to regulate such lotteries, were themselves party to the scam and had a vested interest in perpetuating the malpractices. The victims were poor, powerless and faceless citizens of the country, who could be turned away or silenced easily by any agency they approached with their grievances. The lottery operators, government officials and unscrupulous politicians made tons of money at the cost of the poorest of the poor. It is no surprise that when their unbridled run at making easy money came to an abrupt end—as will be described later—most of the lottery operators shut shop and invested their ill-gotten money in real estate and other capital-intensive enterprises.

When someone buys a lottery ticket, they do so under the impression that a reasonably fair chance to win a prize exists. However, investigations into the above cases revealed that the odds were heavily against the ticket buyers as the sellers of this chance manipulated the conduct of lotteries in such a way that they cornered the odds and the bulk of the proceeds of the lottery went into their own pockets. The buyers received prizes only on the rarest of rare occasions.

To be continued......