With just two more phases of voting left for the marathon 9-phase Indian general elections, the bookies have already registered bets worth about $10 billion on the elections and the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi continues to be the hot favorite of the betters, latest information from the underground bookies’ world indicates.

Significantly, the betters have already dropped Aam Aadmi Party leader (AAP) Arvind Kejriwal like a hot potato. Kejriwal is fighting against Modi from Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh. The latest information is that no one is placing bets on Kejriwal or on other AAP candidates, thus indicating which way the political wind is blowing in India. If one goes by the bets placed with bookies — and betting on elections is generally far more accurate than election surveys — then Modi is winning the elections hands down.

In comparison, the Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi, Modi’s biggest rival for the top job in New Delhi, is way behind.

The latest betting rates, according to sources, are as follows.

A bet of INR100 on Modi will fetch just 110-120 to the winner if Modi becomes the prime minister. In contrast, a bet of similar amount for Rahul Gandhi will fetch INR1000-1200 and a bet on Samajwadi Party leader Mulayam Singh Yadav becoming the prime minister will fetch the winner anywhere between INR2000 to INR2500.

The betters are not confined to the prime ministerial race alone. At least 50-odd high profile electoral contests too have drawn lot of interest from the betters and over $800 million is believed to be running already on such contests.

Such high profile contests are mainly between Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and include the following: Captain Amarinder Singh versus Arun Jaitley (Amritsar, Punjab), Kapil Sibal versus Harshvardhan (Chandni Chowk, Delhi), Nandan Nilekani versus Ananth Kumar (Bangalore South, Karnataka), Reeta Bahuguna versus Rajnath Singh (Lucknow, UP) and Sri Prakash Jaiswal versus Murli Manohar Joshi (Kanpur, UP).

Another interesting trend is that betters are not much interested in seats like Amethi, Rae Bareilly (pocket boroughs of the Gandhis in UP), Vadodara and Gandhinagar in Gujarat from where Modi and BJP patriarch LK Advani are contesting respectively, and Varanasi, the second Lok Sabha seat from where Modi is contesting. The reason is that the betters believe that the outcome is well known and it is going to be a cakewalk for the high profile candidates from these “easy” seats.

However, bets have been made on the victory margin of top leaders.

The largest amount of money riding on the elections in the betting market is unsurprisingly in Mumbai, India’s commercial capital, where bets worth almost $5 billion have been made.

This is followed by southern India ($1.6 billion), North India ($2.5 billion), Ahmedabad ($800 million) and other issue-specific bets like high profile constituencies ($800 million). The total amount of money riding on the Indian elections would inevitably go up as two more polling phases are remaining and the ninth and last round of voting is due to be held on May 12.