RAD­HI­CA DE SIL­VA

Se­nior Mul­ti­me­dia Re­porter

rad­hi­ca.sookraj@guardian.co.tt

As Fi­nance Min­is­ter Dav­en­dranath Tan­coo in­ten­si­fies ef­forts to clamp down on il­le­gal gam­bling while ex­pand­ing state-reg­u­lat­ed lot­tery gam­ing to Sun­days, some booths in San Fer­nan­do re­port­ed steady busi­ness on the first week­end of the new draw sched­ule yes­ter­day.

At Dun­can Vil­lage, San Fer­nan­do, Bob­by’s Restau­rant and Bar pro­pri­etor Ram­lochan Bhag­wan­dass said sales were brisk but mixed, as the change has not ful­ly caught on with all pa­trons de­spite ad­ver­tis­ing through tra­di­tion­al me­dia and so­cial plat­forms.

“Some peo­ple still see Sun­day as a day for church and fam­i­ly and don’t want to gam­ble,” Bhag­wan­dass said.

“But we do get a steady flow, es­pe­cial­ly from peo­ple who come out to buy dou­bles and de­cide to play a mark.”

Bhag­wan­dass said he did not in­vest in ad­di­tion­al staff or re­sources to fa­cil­i­tate Sun­day gam­bling but wel­comed the move, par­tic­u­lar­ly for cus­tomers who can­not get time dur­ing the week. He not­ed that Play Whe was far more pop­u­lar than Lot­to on Sun­days.

“Most peo­ple still pre­fer to play their Lot­to on a Mon­day,” he added.

At King’s Wharf, San Fer­nan­do, reg­u­lar play­er Shayam Bansee­lal said the Sun­day ex­pan­sion was a pos­i­tive step for play­ers like him­self.

“I come every day to bet. It is my hob­by,” Bansee­lal said with a smile.

“You have to spend to win. It have more bad days than good days, but we try­ing. I’m hap­py they’re of­fer­ing it on a Sun­day now.”

Ros­es Rus­sell, of San Fer­nan­do, agreed, say­ing the added day made gam­bling more con­ve­nient.

“It makes sense to have this on a Sun­day be­cause some­times you just don’t get the time dur­ing the week,” she said.

The changes took ef­fect yes­ter­day, fol­low­ing a re­vised no­tice from the Na­tion­al Lot­ter­ies Con­trol Board (NL­CB), which con­firmed new Sun­day draw times for se­lect­ed games.

The ex­pan­sion comes against the back­drop of the Gov­ern­ment’s broad­er push to re­form and reg­u­late the gam­bling sec­tor. Last year, Fi­nance Min­is­ter Tan­coo warned that il­le­gal gam­bling in Trinidad and To­ba­go had grown in­to a mas­sive un­der­ground in­dus­try, es­ti­mat­ing its val­ue at more than $9 bil­lion an­nu­al­ly. At the time, he said the scale of un­reg­u­lat­ed gam­bling rep­re­sent­ed a se­ri­ous loss of rev­enue to the State and un­der­scored the need to strength­en le­gal, trans­par­ent al­ter­na­tives while crack­ing down on il­lic­it op­er­a­tions.

Tan­coo had in­di­cat­ed that changes to the op­er­a­tions of the NL­CB were part of a wider strat­e­gy to mod­ernise the in­dus­try, bring more ac­tiv­i­ty un­der reg­u­la­tion, and en­sure the State ben­e­fits from rev­enue that would oth­er­wise flow in­to il­le­gal chan­nels.