(On 21 August, 2025, Thursday, India's Parliament approved the Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Bill, 2025, to prohibit online games involving monetary stakes. The move has been met with contrasting reactions with some hailing it as positive step in curbing the financial and social risks of online gambling. Critics have raised concerns over the significant threat to the thriving fantasy gaming industry.
In this counterview, Madhavan Narayanan argues that the instead of a blanket ban on money games, the government could have considered a middle ground for soft landing to allow for a transition arrangement that helps both lawmakers and gaming companies. Read the view of the gaming bill here.)
Circa 1990, the man who proudly wore the label of being India's highest income tax payer was a lottery ticket seller. Ashwani Khurana's family controlled about 20 percent of India's lottery business, then estimated at around Rs 1,600 crore.
Things came apart over the next two decades. Only 13 Indian states, most of them in the North-East, now permit lottery tickets. But those 13 are here to show that the desire to legally earn big bucks purely on chance is alive and kicking.
I had a first-hand glimpse of it during a recent visit to Kerala, where I saw people stepping out of temples to meet lottery ticket sellers, perhaps hoping that their prayers inside might be answered.
Online Gaming is Almost Like Lottery
If lottery tickets are legal, what's the big deal about online gaming? India has seen everything from King Yudhishtira gambling away his wife Draupadi in a game of dice in the Mahabharata, to a recent spurt in share initial public offerings (IPOs) in the stock market—including those from dubious SMEs that raised the hackles of those concerned over investor safety and market manipulation.
We got here via a match-fixing scandal in cricket. “Risk hai toh ishq hai (If there’s risk there’s love)" became the tag line of an OTT series on fallen market angel Harshad Mehta.
People betting on IPOs for listing day gains is a common 'game' in India, though it hardly promotes productive economic activity.
Horse racing is still legal as a game of skill, though the average punter may not be able to tell a colt from a filly.
But such is the knee-jerk and lax approach to regulation in India that officials and lawmakers wake up in fits and start to deal with risks. Last week's quick-fix law that bans dubious online games involving "real money earnings" is a belated realisation that a lot of it is only gambling in a new package—with some games barely disguised as ones of skill.
Nobody is a babe in the woods here: neither officials who ought to know the lay of the land and its laws nor entrepreneurs who bet big on games of chance.
In a plotline that might resemble deeply ironic East European movies, we can suppress a chuckle at the fact that while gaming companies were betting on gaming addicts, they were themselves trapped in a web of intrigue.
What We Need Instead
We need a reality check here. Instead of blanket bans, what we perhaps need is a middle ground for soft-landing so that there is a transition arrangement that helps both lawmakers and gaming companies—because it is possible to accuse entrepreneurs of knowingly promoting addictive games of chance and successive governments of knowingly allowing things to linger until things reached a point of social controversy or security risk.
Nazara Technologies, India's leading online gaming company, had its shares listed way back in 2021.
Its shares have crashed by close to 20 percent over the past five days, but it had spelt out its regulatory risks quite clearly in its red herring prospectus at the time of its IPO. The prospectus clearly outlined the global scenario in regulation and the uncertainties involved in the interpretation of gaming laws as also the business risks in games that involved "real money" winning.
With the new law having cleared both houses of India's Parliament, things look like a fait accompli situation for the industry, but in a country where farm laws were shelved after street protests, an online gaming law may yet look for administrative loopholes at least to get some things under control. After all, gaming is not all about gambling.
Interestingly, the man who led a campaign against lottery addiction in Delhi, BJP leader Vijay Goel, also kicked off a campaign against online gaming last year—and is also a key figure in the fight against the harms caused by stray dogs, on which the Supreme Court found a middle ground last week.
Much like the stray dog problem that has strong pros and cons we need a meeting point on online gaming so that the social evils of gaming and the adverse effect it can have on mental health or families are managed better.
You can picture risky, addictive games of chance as something easier to control through regulation rather than an overnight ban. Prohibition, in fact, only runs the risk of running the high-earning industry behind such games underground.
Balancing Innovation and Security in Online Gaming
The Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Bill, 2025, came as a bolt from the blue for the industry because of its secretive introduction that involved no industry consultation.
A big reason for this could be that national security risks were seen in money transfers. The new law bans UPI and money transfers, besides advertisement of dubious games of chance, besides empowering authorities to block unlawful apps. The government officially lists financial fraud, money laundering, terror financing, addiction, and cybercrimes like malware and phishing among the risks triggered by online games.
But then, India has a Public Gambling Act that dates back to 1867. Anti-gambling initiatives are a regular part of governance, much like curbs on alcohol sales and alcoholism.
Online gaming companies cannot plead innocence based on the simplistic claim that they were taken unawares by the new Bill. The government also needs to acknowledge its own laxness in not being aware of the social or security-related side effects of online gaming.
It would also be a good idea to launch a public awareness campaign against addictive gaming or proxy gambling, and build a social consensus on the issue—so that the baby of e-fun is not thrown out along with the bathwater of harmful games or security threats.
(The author is a senior journalist and commentator who has worked for Reuters, Economic Times, Business Standard, and Hindustan Times. He can be reached on Twitter @madversity. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)