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Labourer borrows Rs 200 to buy lottery ticket, wins Rs 1.5 crore

MANDVI (Sangrur): The first thing Manoj Kumar did when he heard that he had won a Rs 1.5 crore jackpot with the Rs 200 that he had borrowed from a neighbour to buy a lottery ticket was tell his eldest daughter, who was on the verge of quitting her studies, that she can pursue her dreams now. He told her that she should in fact prepare to join the Indian Police Service, something that she had always dreamed of. He did something else. He told his other daughter that instead of aiming to be a nurse, she should try to become a doctor. Until a few days back, Manoj, 40, and his wife Raj Kaur earned barely Rs 250 each, working as daily-wagers at a local brick kiln near their village in Punjab’s Sangrur district. Life was tough, what with six mouths to feed.But life turned around after he won the state government’s Rakhi Bumper Lottery. Overnight, the daily wager became a

millionaire. Now property agents hound him and bankers approach him with investment plans. In his village, he is some sort of a hero. If he has one regret, it is that he couldn’t spend well on his ailing father Hawa Singh, who died recently after developing asthmatic complications. “I should have won the lottery earlier. Maybe my father could have been saved," he said. “After my father died, I went back to the brick kiln. Even after putting in extra hours, I could never earn more than Rs 250 a day as I was paid 50 paise per brick.”Though buying agricultural land is on his list of to-do’s, Manoj desperately wants to build a new house for his family so that he

can get them out of the crumbling half-brick, half-mud structure they call home. He is also planning to start a small business and is discussing ideas with close friends and relatives.Manoj’s mother, Krishni Devi, said they moved to Mandvi village in 1984. “We had some relatives living here. In our village in Narwana district of Haryana, floods destroyed crops every year. Here, the panchayat gave us 200 square yards on the outskirts

of the village. Those were good days and people were not as money-minded as they are today,” she smiled. She remembered her husband who spent his entire life mending punctured cycles tyres. Manoj, she said, had to start working as a daily-wagerwhen he was just 15. But all that’s in the past. “God has been kind to us,” Krishni Devi said, bowing before the portrait of Jesus Christ nailed to a dirty old wall.