Kochi: The Kerala Startup Mission (KSUM) has joined the state government to organise an initiative that aims to resolve two major issues plaguing the lottery sector, a prominent source of the state’s revenues.
Named ‘Lottery Challenge’, the mission is to phase out fake tickets in circulation and bring in QR code facilities that will lead to efficient and accurate disbursal of prize money. For this, the Department of State Lotteries has invited applications from startups at https://startupmission.kerala.gov.in/pages/lotterychallenge to be submitted on or before August 15. The search is for a machine that will answer both problems.
The Lottery Challenge has been conceived amid the department’s conduct of seven weekly lotteries and a monthly lottery besides six bumper lotteries a year.
Authorities, pointing to an increasing prevalence of fake lottery tickets, said the department relies on manual checks and verification to identify fake tickets. To address this cumbersome and time-consuming process, the department is seeking a machine that can verify the authenticity of lottery tickets quickly and accurately so as to save time, reduce errors and increase the reliability of the prize disbursal process.
The same machine must also scan the QR code of the tickets at a faster pace, which will lead to efficient and accurate disbursal of prize monies. This is to help avoid the major task of scanning tickets that win prizes at the 35 offices spread across Kerala. The current process is time-consuming, requiring massive human resources. On an average, 300,000 lottery tickets are manually scanned on a daily basis, leading to considerable delay and errors.
The Department of State Lotteries, under the Ministry of Finance, has the secretary of Taxes Department as the authority specifically appointed to organise draws and to regulate the sale of tickets from other states. KSUM is Kerala government’s nodal agency established in 2006 for entrepreneurship development and incubation activities in the state.
