Thiruvananthapuram: The lottery director has issued orders to Kerala Books and Publishing Society to stop the printing of lottery tickets lined up for next week until further notice. The move has been necessitated by the sudden fall in the sale of lottery tickets. The printing of all the seven lotteries - Win-Win, Dhanasree, Akshaya, Pratheeksha, Bhagyanidhi, Karunya, and Pournami – scheduled to be drawn from November 20 to 26 has been cancelled. There will be no lottery sales next week.
“We found that most of the agents have unsold tickets in their hands causing them huge financial strain,” a top Lottery Department source said. Majority of the 50,000 lottery vendors are financially backward and physically-challenged. “The unsold tickets are already a huge blow to them,” the official said. The Department also felt that if new tickets were printed, they too would remain unsold. “In such a situation we would be forced to postpone the date of draw once again," the official said.
Already the Department had already stopped the draw of lots from November 15. Draws scheduled from 15 to 19 will now be held from November 22 to 26. Printing tickets and then postponing the draw is financially unsound as the government still has to pay service tax on the tickets printed to the Centre and also pay sales tax to the state.
