Karnataka - Bangalore   

Ticket to a livelihood snatched away

Kanasu Nagathihalli

Ban on lotteries leaves ticket sellers without jobs

NO FUTURE: Lottery vendors Manjunath (left), Venkatesh (middle) and Govind in Bangalore.

BANGALORE: "My only source of income has been snatched away and I must now beg to earn my bread and butter," says Govindappa, a man with physical disability, who has earned his livelihood in the last 40 years by selling lottery tickets in the crowded Majestic area.

With the Government's ban on lotteries, the dingy area behind the Majestic cinema, once a hub of the lottery business in the State, now wears a deserted look.

Business of the poor

There are at least 300 to 400 people with physical disability who earn their livelihood from selling lottery tickets. Govindapa, for example, says that he buys 150 tickets for Rs. 120 twice a day. If he manages to sell all the tickets, he earns around Rs. 60 a day, enough to pay for his three meals.

"We sell tickets from 8 a.m. to around 10 p.m. in the Mysore Bank-Anand Rao Circle area," says Venkatesh. You would wonder how he mans his beat, as his legs end at his knees. He has been in the business for 20 years. "This is a business done by the poor. If lotteries are banned, we will have no work," he says.

Twenty-one-year-old Manjunath has been selling lottery tickets for the last eight years and says he wants to do nothing else. "It is too late to study now and I have to earn for my mother and sister. Lottery is a business in which you have to work every day to earn your daily living," he says.

Most lottery ticket sellers earn around Rs. 2,000 a month. Their only plea, they say, is that paper lotteries should not be banned.

The widely prevalent superstition that buying a lottery ticket from persons with disability weighs luck in one's favour has made this business an attractive one for these people. With the ban, however, many of them now have no alternate means of employment and no place to go.

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