DNA Edit: Cleaning the game

In mid-2015, a Delhi trial court acquitted pace bowler S Sreesanth and others who were accused by the Delhi police of spot-fixing in a domestic cricket tournament. The acquittal was granted on the ground that cricket betting, per se, is not illegal in India and no consequent legal action can be taken against those betting on cricket matches. The order was passed by the judge after considering Section 12 of the 1867 Public Gambling Act that explicitly excludes a game of skill from the purview of gambling. Cricket, the judge said, cannot be described as anything but a game of skill. Seeing red, the Delhi police filed an appeal against the order in the Delhi High Court hoping for a conviction.

However, the glaring lapse here is the Centre’s inability to plug this policy loophole. Even the Lodha Committee, set up by the Supreme Court (SC), to clean the Augean stables of BCCI had recommended that betting on cricket ought to be legalised. Consequently, the SC had suggested that this matter should be examined by the Law Commission, which is set to recommend to the government that cricket betting should be brought under the law’s purview. This is most welcome. As per the estimates of the FICCI, an industry lobbying group, the domestic betting market is worth at least Rs 3 lakh crore and an overwhelming 80 per cent of the bets are placed in cricket alone. By making this underground business mainstream, the government will cash in on ready revenue streams of tax income accruing from these bets.

However, care will have to be taken that tax rates levied on these bets are not unreasonably or unattractively high or it will have an undesirable effect of pushing willing participants into the folds of the bookies. Once the recommendations of the Commission become clear, the government will be able to chalk out a better strategy to regulate this domain.