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A bill banning online real-money gaming has passed India’s lower house within hours of its introduction and with no debate, signalling a central government ambush on an industry now staring at oblivion.
The government on Wednesday (August 21) introduced the Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Bill 2025 in the Lok Sabha, later ramming the bill through on a voice vote amid opposition protests and confusion over unrelated bills.
The bill now goes to the Rajya Sabha, or upper house, and appears likely to pass on government numbers, though it was not immediately clear if the ban on all online games with stakes, whether skill- or chance-based, will first undergo committee scrutiny.
Electronics and information technology minister Ashwini Vaishnaw opened what appeared to be a second reading debate on the bill, amid constant protest from opposition members furious over separate bills that would remove detained elected representatives from office.
Vaishnaw followed praise for e-gaming and social gaming, which will be regulated under the bill, with an attack on the real-money gaming segment of online card and other skill games and fantasy sports, “which has become a matter of great concern in the community today”.
Citing cases of financial ruin and suicide and World Health Organization labelling of “online gaming [addiction] as a disorder”, Vaishnaw said “many families have been destroyed” by online gaming.
“It has almost become evident that online gaming – cash gaming – is having a serious impact on families.
“Money laundering is happening, terror is being supported.”
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, he said, “has never compromised” on middle-class family welfare, “and this bill has been brought to stop a big evil that is coming in the community”.
The bill then passed on a voice vote amid opposition catcalling.
If passed, the bill will leave alone individual gamers but criminalise an industry attracting billions of dollars in investment and employing hundreds of thousands of people, while driving millions of customers underground where problem gambling and money laundering will flourish, industry trade groups warn.
Passage will also likely trigger immediate industry appeals to the courts given the Supreme Court of India’s consistent support for the constitutionality of skill games with stakes.
State governments such as Karnataka with significant gaming industry investment on the line, and others such as Sikkim with existing laws allowing online gaming with stakes, may also respond with litigation. Karnataka’s IT minister on Wednesday slammed the bill as “knee-jerk” lawmaking and the signal for an “ecosystem collapse” impacting the wider gaming segment and associated investment.
Naqeeb Ahmed, a Bengaluru-based partner with Indus Law, predicted a spate of lawsuits, and said the misnamed bill is primarily punitive rather than promotional or regulatory.
The instant loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs in a blanket ban would not nearly be balanced by promised job gains in the esports and social gaming segments, he told Vixio GamblingCompliance on Wednesday.
“The gaming industry has consistently taken a view that a complete ban on real-money games is violative of Article 19 of the Constitution of India, which deals with right to practice any profession or carry on any occupation, trade or business.
“Further, courts in India have also distinguished real-money games of skill from games of chance and have treated them as legitimate business under Article 19. Prohibiting such legitimate business will certainly be constitutionally challenged.”
The politics of the bill could also embitter India’s start-ups and other investment in the broader gaming sector, given the government’s abandonment of consultation with industry after years of its attempts to understand, cooperate with and encourage it.
Right-Wing Influence
In an India Today opinion piece on Wednesday, deputy editor Anilesh Mahajan wrote that passage of the online gaming bill “could reverberate across industries far removed from gaming”.
Years of central government reluctance to take a firm stance on online gaming policy amid growing social and media concern created a political vacuum that has been filled by right-wing and Hindu-supremacist groups affiliated with Prime Minister Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), he said.
Functionaries of these groups in “closed-door consultations” with government figures had “invoked parallels with colonial-era opium and liquor trades, which they said had weakened communities from within,” Mahajan wrote.
“By the time the Cabinet [draft legislation] circulated, the push from the ideological right had become impossible to ignore.”
Mahajan wrote that the gaming bill’s sudden appearance and passage points to a “political project, not just a regulatory measure,” in which culture and executive power prevail over capital and the judiciary.
It also plays well to BJP voters in southern states where courts have vacated state government bans on online gaming.
The Modi government’s “decisive intervention allows the BJP to claim ownership of a cause that regional parties had fumbled.
“By centralising regulation, the government not only resolves a messy federal dispute but also asserts Delhi’s primacy over a digital sector once seen as beyond traditional governance.”
In the end, the draft legislation asserts that the government may police the “moral fabric of society” and is a “statement of intent from a government that thrives on decisive gestures,” he wrote.
Mahajan wrote that the ultimate message for investors is “blunt”.
“Profits cannot come at the cost of social order, [but] the message to voters is sharper still: the state will intervene, aggressively if necessary, to protect families from what it sees as corrosive forces.
“In a season of high political stakes, the bill has become both policy and politics, an emblem of how the Modi government views the trade-offs between growth, morality and control.”
