Student files petition
The Bombay High Court has requested that the Maharashtra government decide one way or another about the status of a 40-year-old law that made it legal to operate casinos in the state.
According to DNA India, Justices V M Kanade and Shalini Phansalkar-Joshi heard a petition filed by law student Jay Satya, who discovered that the law passed in 1976, but was never fully enacted. Satya found the Maharashtra Casinos Control and Tax Act through a freedom-of-information search. In December, he wrote a letter to Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis asking him to confirm the find, but received no answer.
“The government of Maharashtra has arbitrarily and unreasonably kept in abeyance the act by not notifying it,” Satya wrote in his filing. He found support from the Mumbai High Court, which directed the state government “to decide within reasonable time on the issue of implementation of the act, particularly since the legislation was enacted almost 40 years ago.” The act as originally crafted provides for casino licenses, details which kinds of games would be permitted, and also set a tax rate.
Currently, just three states in India permit any form of casino gambling: Goa, Daman and Sikkim, according to the India Times. The PIL alleges that the government of Maharashtra has “arbitrarily and unreasonably” kept the act in limbo by refusing to ratify it. Lawyer Anirudh Hariani of Hariani & Company, the legal firm that filed the PIL said the government “will generate a revenue of thousands of crore” if it allows development of casinos in the state.
