Maharashtra lottery sales forced to pay taxes

The Bombay High Court ruled the lottery must pay a tax on the sale of tickets after a failed petition by a lottery distribution company.

India.- A recent challenge to the Maharashtra Tax on Lotteries Act from 2006 has been rejected by the Bombay High Court. The petition aimed to stop the Act, which levies tax on the sale of lottery tickets in the state and was filed by Mangal Murti Marketing a company which operates as a sub-distributor of the state-organised lottery of the governments of Arunachal Pradesh and Nagaland.

The petitioner’s counsel P S Raman assured that the Act was passed to restrict and forbid the sale of other states’ lottery tickets in Maharashtra. He claimed that the Lottery Regulation Act had already been enacted in 1998 to regularise the conduct of state organised lottery business and with a view to offer security to ticket purchasers and claimed that the state government can’t levy taxes on another state government’s revenues.

However, the High Court sided with the state government’s Advocate General Ashutosh Kumbhakoni, who said the Lottery Regulation Act was passed to regularise but not to tax. “The word lottery is defined, as in the dictionary, as a type of gamble in which people buy numbered tickets. Several numbers are then chosen randomly and people who have those numbers on their tickets win a prize,” the court said.