Online Lottery A Menace?

We never seem to be short of problems. We live in a society which has been blessed by discoveries and inventions of science and technology. New discoveries have empowered us and forced us into abandoning some of our old habits and mindsets in the light of new knowledge gathered. But it is ironical that side by side a large segment of our people who continue to behave in a self-destructive and irrational way which always baffle us and the prevalent online lottery games – a gamble of the most dangerous forms has spawned in every nooks and crannies of the country. It is the newest addition to the long list of vices under which our society is reeling.

It would be mistake to believe that only youths are the victims of this pernicious lottery game. It is a great leveller. The place where this great game goes on has all the attributes of a typical gambler's den and the milling motley group of people cutting across all sections of society from an office- going babu to a rickshaw puller. Some underage youngsters and street urchins too may be seen in these dens. And if you look at their faces of some of them these truly mirror the state of affairs in our society. Once I , being unable to hold my curiosity, engaged a young man who barely completed his teens and a regular in one of these dens, in a long chat. And what transpired in the course of the chat , was enough to lose my equanimity. He held a job of sorts which fetched some rupees 2500 in a month and he took to it with a bit of success initially. But later on it turned out to be an addiction and he regularly lost money and to feed this dangerous ambition of becoming rich overnight, he started borrowing from his friends and other sources. What is disconcerting is that poor people like rickshaw pullers , coolies, daily wage-earners have their existence threatened with this new menace.

There is an interesting development in this regard . As it happens in a number of other cases, our judiciary more often than not , has to step in to force a somnolent government to discharge his constitutional obligations in a situation like this. There is a case before the Supreme Court and the petitioner is a management graduate and a victim of this online lottery and the hearing of the case is on and let us hope when the verdict finally comes of the Apex court, there would some effective measures to control this menace. But governmental measures alone can not be effective and we need to spread the awareness among the people about the perils of these online lottery games.