Kerala man wins lottery hours before selling house to pay off debts

You would have likely scoffed in disbelief if you'd watched it at the climax of a movie.

But this is for real, and it happened in Kerala's Manjeshwar district. A man won Rs 1 crore in a state lottery just a couple of hours before he was to accept a token advance on the distress sale of his house.

Mohammed Bava, 50, was putting his newly-built house on sale because he owed Rs 50 lakh to debtors, and was running out of ways to pay it back. He had borrowed the money from relatives and from a bank for the wedding of his two daughters and for covering the losses from his real estate business.


That was when he was forced to put his own house up for sale. Then, on Sunday, a vendor he knew passed by his house and offered him a Fifty-Fifty lottery ticket run by the Kerala government. Out of sheer desperation, not knowing what else to do, Bava invested a bit in luck and it paid off big time.

"The result of the lottery was announced by 3.30 pm on Sunday. Luckily, I got the prize. Earlier in the day, the buyers had informed us that they would come to give a token advance for my house by 5.30 pm," PTI quoted Bava as saying.

Of course, he did not go ahead with the sale of his house. He will get Rs 63 lakh in hand after tax cuts, and will use that money to pay off his debt. Some of the rest, he said, he would like to spend for the needy.