Having failed to get major political parties as well as many state governments to agree to a plan to have a law banning lottery trade across the country, the Union Cabinet on Thursday gave the go-ahead to the Union Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) to withdraw a Bill in this regard that is pending in the Rajya Sabha for more than 10 years.

The Bill was introduced when the BJP-led NDA was ruling the country. Sources in the MHA told The Indian Express that many state governments had strongly opposed the proposed law, mainly on the contention that lottery business was one of the major sources of revenue for them.

On Thursday, while allowing the MHA to withdraw the Bill, the Cabinet asked it to persuade the state governments to regulate lottery trade.

The Lotteries Prohibition Bill, 1999 was introduced in the Rajya Sabha by then home minister L K Advani but could not be passed and was instead put on the back-burner after 80 MPs wrote to then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee opposing it.

The Bill was aimed at making lottery trade an illegal activity. Anybody running a lottery trade or helping somebody else run it would have invited a jail term to a maximum of two years and/or fine.

It is learnt that the governments of Jammu and Kashmir, Arunachal Pradesh, Goa, Maharashtra, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Punjab and Sikkim opposed the Bill, while the states which supported it included Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Tripura.

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