THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The sale of state lotteries resumed on Thursday after a gap of two months. A total of 1.39 lakh tickets of eight lotteries were sold on the day. Only tickets of postponed draws will be sold this month. New tickets will be launched in June.
The Lotteries Department had postponed eight draws when the ticket sales were stopped in March last due to the pandemic spread. These include seven weekly lotteries and the Summer Bumper. Sources in the Lotteries Department said the initial day’s sale was hopeful though the figure pales in comparison to the previous daily average. The department prints 90-96 lakh tickets of its weekly lotteries. On a normal day unsold tickets would come around only a few hundreds.
The tickets being sold now are of Pournami (two draws), Win-Win, Sthree Sakthi, Akshaya, Karunya Plus, Nirmal and the Summer Bumper. The Summer Bumper lottery draw was originally scheduled on March 31. The new date is June 26 and 8.4 lakh of the total 10 lakh tickets were sold until Thursday. The lottery sales is being conducted as per the social distancing directions of the government.
State lotteries is a major non-tax revenue source of the state government. The department’s sales turnover in 2018-19 was Rs 9,262.70 crore. Target for FY 20 was Rs 11,863 crore. Finance Minister Thomas Isaac had earlier said that the achievement would be much low due to the pandemic and lockdown.