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| Gambling
away the golden goose? According to government officials, under this instant big money gambling system on the lines of a little Las Vegas, people could buy tickets from agents, mark numbers and match them with draw results that will be displayed on a TV screen which is with the agent. The system is centralised and computerised and the numbers marked by customers would be entered into a terminal printer and checked whether they match the drawn numbers- with the whole process being super controlled by companies based in Norway and the United States. A draw will be held every 15 minutes. Each play would cost Rs. 30 and the lottery offers a prize money of Rs. 600,000 per draw. The prizes of draws will be less than offline tickets but will create more winners. The aim of the new system is mainly to attract upper class people who don't buy offline tickets while the system would be accessible to the common people who generally patronise the present day lotteries. The two new online lottery systems will be managed by private companies with agreements already signed. The National Lotteries Board has signed up with a Norwegian company while the Mahapola lottery is to be revived with the management of the lottery being taken over by a company known as GTech, based in US in association with a local company. The NLB online lottery managed by the Norwegina company Norsk Tipping, will first operate in Colombo and will later go islandwide. Manoji Samararatne, Marketing Manager for the Online National Lotteries Pvt. Limited said the Norwegian company would manage the lottery for five years and the deal would be reviewed after that. She said a percentage of the lottery, though the amount had yet not been fixed, would go to the Parliament Scholarship Fund. The main question posed now is whether the offline lotteries operated by both the National Lotteries Board and the Development Lotteries Board would be affected by the new online lottery. Though the new companies would say they are mainly targeting upper class society, there is a possibility that the average person who would have bought an offline lottery would switch to buying the modern ticket because it is not very expensive. On the other hand another question posed is whether the upper class would be attracted to the lottery when draw prizes would be less than one million. With these and other questions hanging over this new hi-tech gambling exercise, many would wonder whether this is just another privatisation of a popular public venture which gave some hope and relief to common people. Meanwhile the Mahapola Trust Fund which is relaunching its Mahapola lottery after about eight years has been offered a minimum revenue of Rs. 400 million and assured of another 10 per cent, by the US based managament company according to Shyamila Perera, Director General of the Mahapola Board of Management of the Mahapola Higher Education Scholarship Trust Fund. For decades national lotteries have been a major revenue earner for the country. So an important question is whether Sri lanka is getting the best deal and whether the government could not have streamlined and operated the offline and online lotteries on its own without handing them over to foreign companies. If the foreign company has assured Rs. 400 million plus another 10 percent to the Mahapola Board, the profits earned by this foreign company must obvioulsy be many times more as foreign investors are generally known to take away a lot while investing relatively little. These issues are raised at a time when the Mahapola Trust Fund which supports about 8000 University students each year is urgently in need of more money. Commerce Minister Ravi Karunanayake under whom the Mahapola Scholarship fund operates has regularly complained that the President's Fund is not releasing enough money for Mahapola. In this context analysts ask whether the Mahapola Board could not have been streamlined to earn more than the Rs. 400 million being offered by the US management company. In 2000, the Development Lottery earned a profit of Rs. 412 million out of which the Mahapola Trust Fund should have received half. In 2001 the Development Lotteries' profit was Rs. 485 million while 2002 provided a profit of Rs. 948 million, according to reports. Profits from lotteries in Sri Lanka in the last few years show a strong pickup and they are expected to be higher in the coming years. Therefore many economic analysts raise the question as to why the government may be gambling away revenue to foreign companies when the lottery industry in Sri Lanka has become a money spinner. GTech will launch the Mahapola Online Lottery from April this year. It was selected in a tender process which attracted eight other companies. Commerce Ministry officials say the Mahapola lottery is being handed over to a foreign company with the aim of obtaining more funds for University scholarships and other educational scholarships. |
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