India’s Parliament has now passed the Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Bill, 2025—an overdue attempt to impose order on an industry that for too long has hidden behind the euphemism of “gaming”
while in reality running an unregulated gambling economy. For years, the government flirted with self-regulation, hoping the industry would police itself. But the evidence of harm—addiction, suicides, family bankruptcies, fraud, and money laundering—has been overwhelming. This Bill is the first serious attempt to promote esports and casual games while ring-fencing society from the predations of online money-games. This is a much-needed legislation and CIPP has been asking for it for years. At its heart, the Bill draws a red line: any online game that involves staking or winning money is prohibited. Section 5 makes it unlawful to advertise, sponsor, or promote such games. The law expands liability beyond operators to include publishers, app stores, payment gateways, advertisers, and influencers. If a payment intermediary routes money into a banned app, or if an app store lists it in defiance of a blocking order, they face penalties alongside the operator. The Bill creates an Online Gaming Authority to license permissible forms of gaming—esports, educational, and social titles—while giving it powers of search, seizure, blocking, and financial interdiction. In short, it shifts enforcement from a failed self-regulatory experiment to statutory authority.
Why self-regulation failed
In April 2023, the government amended the IT Rules to allow industry-led Self-Regulatory Organisations (SROs) to certify “permissible” games. The idea was that games of skill would be permitted while wagering games would be kept out, supported by voluntary features like age-gating, self-exclusion, and time-limits (MeitY Press Note). But this framework depended on the very platforms profiting from money-gaming to draw the boundaries. Predictably, compliance never came. Banned games reappeared with new branding; advertising continued unabated; payments found fresh channels.
The new Bill closes those gaps by making promotion a statutory offence, banning money-games outright, and giving the Authority teeth to block apps and seize assets. Ministerial statements have compared the public-health harm of online gambling to narcotics, a recognition that the addiction and financial ruin caused by such apps is not a moral panic but a measurable crisis (News18 explainer).
The human cost
The harms are not abstract. The Mahadev betting syndicate—uncovered by the Enforcement Directorate—ran about 30 call centres across Indian cities, onboarding users, creating fake IDs, and laundering money through hawala networks. Police records in Karnataka alone documented 32 suicides in 31 months linked to compulsive online rummy losses Families across India have been pushed into debt traps as players borrowed from predatory instant-loan apps to cover their spiralling losses.
This is not gaming. This is financial predation dressed up as entertainment.
Online gambling lobby and its myths
Predictably, the industry has responded with scare tactics. The All India Gaming Federation, E-Gaming Federation, and Federation of Indian Fantasy Sports claimed in a joint letter to the Home Minister that banning money-games would cost 200,000 jobs. The number has been repeated uncritically in trade press and lobbying documents.
But the provenance of this number is thin. The only independent study with verifiable projections—the Deloitte–FIFS report—estimates that the entire fantasy sports sector will generate just 17,500 direct and indirect jobs by FY27 (Deloitte–FIFS report). That is an order of magnitude lower than the headline claims that the various online gaming lobbyists have floated in response to the bill. Loss of jobs is the most significant policy driver for the political leadership but this industry reflects that it can cook up numbers at a day’s notice to push an agenda, and when it is questioned, it quietly walks away without responding.
What kind of jobs are being generated by these online gaming platforms? They cluster in product and engineering teams at a few large platforms; in user-acquisition and affiliate marketing desks; in call-centre style customer support; in risk, fraud, and payments monitoring; and in influencer or sponsorship marketing. Some of these are genuine digital economy roles. But enforcement files also show that a slice of “jobs” in this industry are actually call centres set up by illegal operators like Mahadev to onboard users, handle deposits, and launder funds. Should we count these as jobs worth preserving?
Let’s be clear: employment that depends on drawing more young Indians into gambling debt is not a public good. It is a public cost. The psychotropic industry and the global cocaine producers can also claim that they are an industry that employs millions of people, hence the government should not ban them. Online gaming has been proven to be as addictive as cocaine.
CIPP’s role in advocacy
At the Centre for Innovation in Public Policy (CIPP), we have long argued for control and regulation of the online gaming industry. Our work has consistently highlighted its impact on youth attention, education outcomes, and family finances. We warned that the longer the state delayed, the more entrenched money-gaming operators would become. We proposed that regulation must focus not only on taxation and licensing but also on public health, given the rise in compulsive use and suicides linked to online games.
I have written earlier: “The convergence of gaming and gambling steals [the young’s] most productive asset—their attention.” I have advocated for treating dopamine-engineered products as an externality to be taxed and regulated like alcohol or tobacco. And in News18, I laid out how the state’s failure to act decisively risked creating a generation addicted to online gambling disguised as gaming. And the government did levy a GST on these companies but they found loopholes through tax havens to avoid it by hiding their companies behind a web. Now, their lobbyists are claiming that the government is going to lose taxation worth Rs 20,000 crore where do they get these numbers nobody knows.
The new Bill reflects much of what we at CIPP have been advocating: a statutory authority with enforcement powers, strict liability for platforms and facilitators, advertising bans, and a licensing lane for esports and casual games.
Why the Bill matters
This law matters for three reasons. First, it harmonises a patchwork of state laws and court rulings by establishing a national baseline: money-games are prohibited, period. No more hair-splitting between “skill” and “chance” when stakes are financial. Something that was used to make an artificial difference between gambling and gaming
Second, it targets the right actors. Enforcement is aimed at platforms, payment processors, and promoters—not individual users, who are often victims themselves.
Third, it creates a future for India’s esports and educational gaming industry. By offering licensing, compliance standards, and ad norms, it provides legitimacy and a runway for investment, innovation and growth.
The way forward
Passing the Bill is just the first step. The government must now implement it with precision:
- Explicit criteria for classifying permitted vs. prohibited games.
- A binding advertising code, with penalties for repeat violations.
- Real-time blacklisting by payment intermediaries, to choke off evasion channels.
- Federal coordination so that state police, cyber cells and the new Authority act in concert.
The Bill finally gives India the tools. The challenge is to use them consistently and transparently.
A child’s attention and a household’s financial resilience are scarce public goods. Products that exploit them under the guise of “skill gaming” do not deserve the legitimacy of sport or the indulgence of self-regulation.
The Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Bill, 2025, is not just a law—it is a statement of principle. It says India will promote esports, education, and genuine play, but it will not sacrifice its youth to gambling disguised as gaming.
This truth is now law.
K Yatish Rajawat is a public policy researcher and works at the Gurgaon-based think and do tank Centre for Innovation in Public Policy (CIPP). Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.
