Legalise it? You bet

The scandal about spot-fixing in the Indian Premier League has led the Centre to promise bringing a standalone law against rigging sports encounters. But should the response to the scam have been much broader and more comprehensive? Is the right way forward, as the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry has recommended, the legalisation of sports betting? In a country raised on the story of Yudishtira losing his kingdom and his wife on a few rolls of dice, the idea of legalising any form of betting seems shocking, even sacrilegious.

But the scrupulous rigour of such a puritanical position needs to be re-examined in the light of a few facts. First of all, it is important to enter a caveat to the effect that a proposal to legalise sports betting is not a call to decriminalise all forms of gambling, especially the kind that involves a roll of the dice or the turn of a roulette wheel. Second, the proposal is not as radical as it seems on the face of it. Since betting on horse racing is legal on the (Supreme Court-endorsed) ground that it is a game of skill, what is the logic for not extending this to other sports such as cricket? Finally, let us keep in mind that in our arbitrary and far from uniform approach to gaming, playing rummy in clubs is kosher (but poker is probably not halal) and that casinos and lotteries may be licensed by States as they have been in Goa and Sikkim.

At the best of times, betting is extremely difficult to control; in an age where online gaming sites have mushroomed, it is well nigh impossible. But the real ground for a more sensible and realistic policy on betting is the enormous risk of letting it flourish in a shadowy underworld. As the spot-fixing scam has revealed, this is a massive money laundering operation with long and ugly tentacles that reach out to terror outfits. The revenue from legalising sports betting is enormous; a KPMG study quoted by FICCI states that illegal betting is a Rs 3,00,000 crore market and a sin tax could earn the exchequer anything between Rs. 12,000 crore and Rs 20,000 crore annually.

Legalising sports betting would create the kind of transparency that would inhibit spot-fixing and match-fixing, if not kill them altogether. At the same time, it is important to recognise that gambling, legal or illegal, poses a serious problem for society. One would be blind not to recognise its capacity to destroy some individuals and their families because of its addictive power. The answer to this problem are programmes to protect the vulnerable against pathological gambling, something that is much easier to do in a regulated environment. It is not met by an ostrich-headed puritanism that fails to see the problem or deludes itself into believing it will simply go away.

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