Mumbai: Following the introduction of Goods and Services Tax (GST), the betting collections of many racing centres have gone down drastically and it has almost become a battle for survival for them. To arrest this slide at Tote (legalised betting windows), Royal Western India Turf Club (RWITC) has proposed to put in place a combined national pool for Tote betting.
“At a meeting of Turf Authorities of India (TAI) held in Bangalore last Thursday, we proposed to have a combined National Tote,” RWITC chairman Khushroo Dhunjibhoy said on Wednesday. “The other racing clubs have agreed to our proposal. We will work out the modalities and present a concrete proposal regarding the timeline of the introduction of the National Tote, which will be taken up for a final decision at TAI’s meeting to be held in Ooty on May 22,” Dhunjibhoy added.
Santosh Kumar, the Tote general manager at RWITC, said at least eight pools are common at all the racing clubs and the modalities will be prepared around them. “We may have some different pools among all clubs, like at RWITC we have super jackpot pool while Bangalore has mini-jackpot. But at least eight pools like win, place, shp, quinella, forecast, tanala, treble and jackpot can be combined at national level. We have already started working on those possibilities,” Santosh said.
There are also talks of creating a smartphone app for betting. “We have apps for rummy and poker running already. We don’t see any problem with having a mobile app for horse racing betting,” Dhunjibhoy said.
Having always been at the forefront of new initiatives in racing, RWITC, has also proposed to prepare a domestic racing calendar to ensure there is no clash of racing programme between clubs. “In consultation with handicappers of other clubs, RWITC has drawn an all-India fixture. Like Sundays have been equally shared between Hyderabad and RWITC. When RWITC has races on Saturday and Sundays, Hyderabad will happen on Friday and Monday and when RWITC conducts racing on Friday and Saturday, Hyderabad will have races on Sundays and Mondays,” the RWITC chairman revealed.
There is also a proposal to have a minimum of six races and a maximum of eight races in a day. The minimum number of entries and acceptors will also be fixed for a race to go through in sweepstakes and non-sweepstakes races. The TAI will also fix the class wise stakes money across all clubs with a flexibility of upto 20 per cent variation.
The RWITC has also decided to reduce the number of evening races from 23 to 16 next season. The racing body will also increase the stake-money for the last 10 days of the current Mumbai season and the upcoming Pune season. For the last 10 days the stakes money for class I will be Rs 6 lakhs as against current five lakhs. For II it will be Rs 5,56,250, for III Rs 5,00,000, for IV Rs 4,56,000, for V Rs 4,12,000 and for 2/3 yrs olds Rs 6,00,000.
