The home ministry plans to legalise online lotteries by lifting the ban clamped by the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Front government in 1998 through a comprehensive Lottery Act.
The move comes in the wake of online lottery operators of Kerala moving the Supreme Court against the ban clamped by the state government under powers conferred by the Act. The online lottery is banned by many state governments on the ground that it is sheer gambling.
The draft rules circulated by the home ministry to amend the Lotteries (Regulation) Rules, 2010, however, seek to legalise online lottery by clubbing it with other lotteries. The only safeguard in the rules is that the online lotteries will be run either by the state government or controlled by the state government.
The draft amendment says the central computer server for online lotteries will be "under the direct control of the organising state that accepts, processes, stores and validates the online lottery transactions and otherwise manages, monitors and controls the entire system."
It described online lottery as the system that permits players to purchase lottery tickets with numbers of their choice from a computer or online machine (read Internet) that are registered in the central computer server with date of sale.
BJP is opposed to online lotteries and for that matter all lotteries, particularly single and double digit lotteries, as it says they entice people to indulge into gambling. A party spokesman said the BJP would oppose fresh attempt of the Centre to give a fillip to gambling, pointing out that all lotteries are banned in the BJP-ruled states. The BJP is, however, a partner in the coalition government in Punjab that continues to have the state-run lotteries.
Online lotteries mushroomed in India in the mid-90s.
