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

However, the trick of the trade was to somehow get an authorization from the lottery department of a state government for running a lottery, for which a small amount of royalty was paid to state authorities.

Regrettably, the lottery departments, having given such authorization, ceded control to the private lottery operators. Nobody knew when and where the draws were held; nobody knew who attended the draws and whether any representative of the government was present. Thus, the lottery operators could do what they wanted.

The second and most reprehensible act of chicanery was to print far fewer tickets than were declared in the scheme.

For instance, if the scheme envisaged twenty lakh tickets, only two lakh tickets were printed. Further, not all two lakh tickets printed were sold. However, when the draws took place, not only were all twenty lakh ticket numbers approved by the lottery department concerned included, but also included were the unsold ticket numbers, reducing the chance of a valid ticket buyer winning a prize by more than 90 per cent.

All chances accruing out of unprinted and unsold tickets stayed with the lottery operator. Thus, over 90 per cent of the time, the prize-winning tickets were those that were with the operator himself.
If even against these adverse odds a valid ticket buyer won a prize, the lottery operator would turn away such a ticket holder, claiming that the ticket was never printed and the claimant was producing a forged ticket. The poor man was threatened with legal action for forgery.

At the beginning of this story we saw how lottery organizers shooed away Pritam Kumar Razak of Jamalpur and Jasminder Singh of New Delhi, denying them their legitimate prize money and holding on to every penny of the cash paid by ticket buyers from across the country.

To be continued......