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New Delhi: India has a knack for ambitious legislative experiments, and the “Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Bill, 2025” — passed in the Lok Sabha yesterday with a voice vote — is nothing if not ambitious. In theory, it promises a future where digital playrooms foster innovation, skill-building, and global competitiveness, while the predatory jungles of online money gaming are razed by the force of law. In practice, the Bill risks crushing both the threat and the promise of a burgeoning industry, while posturing as a panacea for social malaise.

Who am I to offer this bold prognosis with any authority? A bit of my biographical history. Back in 2007-08, I started a gaming business from scratch with two fresh-out-of-college engineers and built online games for two of the world’s biggest internet investors, eager to test India’s digital waters.

Within two years, our mix of social and multiplayer games made us one of India’s largest gaming platforms. In addition to our repertoire of games rooted in local contexts, we also had `online versions of popular offline card games — Rummy, Teen Patti, Poker and cricket fantasy & cricket stock exchange games.

Here’s the irony: the only legal framework for those online games rested on a 1968 Supreme Court judgment that classified 13-card Rummy as a game of skill. Online platforms then were using that 1968 judgement which was in the context of physical places of gambling (‘gaming house’) — and belonged to a time when consumer internet didn’t even exist. Other than that, the only other examples were of lotteries being allowed in some states.

Fast forward 18 years. Mobile internet is central to our daily lives, and online gaming is ubiquitously accessible. Yet regulation till now had been patchy and often opportunistic.

The Bill’s Intent

The proposed statute is wide in its sweep: it bans every variant of online “money game,” whether based on skill, chance, or a clever admixture of both, if a stake is involved and the player stands to gain or lose monetarily. E-sports are fenced off as legitimate sport — provided they are free of any whiff of betting. Social and educational games, so long as they don’t involve cash prizes, are not just tolerated but actively encouraged; the state will even bankroll training academies and guide the young toward digital literacy.

Why this regulatory absolutism? The government’s argument is both familiar and not without merit. Online gambling, especially on phone apps with slickly engineered compulsivity, can devastate families and users. The spectre, often wielded in parliamentary debate, is that India’s vast pool of mobile-armed and underemployed youth are easy prey for pushers of digital roulette. Throw in allegations about links to fraud, money laundering, and even terrorism, and the regulatory heavy hand starts to look like civic virtue.

Yet the digital world — like the world itself — is more nuanced than that. Drawing a big, bright legislative line between “money games” and “e-sports” or “social games” reveals more about some unarticulated anxieties & insights than it does about purported public interest.

The US & UK Approach

Consider, for comparison, the regulatory landscapes of the United States and the United Kingdom. The US, after a landmark Supreme Court decision struck down a federal sports-betting ban, has left the decision to permit or regulate online gambling to the states, producing a patchwork of laws where fantasy sports, poker, and betting are legal in one state, criminal in the next. The dividing line? Often, whether the game is one of skill or mere chance — a distinction as philosophically thorny as the nature of luck itself. The UK, meanwhile, takes a more pragmatic, harm-reductionist view: gambling, if licensed and well-regulated, is tolerated, provided operators respect strict consumer-protection rules and don’t prey on the vulnerable.

Thou Shall Not Bet

India’s draft law, by contrast, eschews the skill-vs-chance debate and flattens the entire money gaming sector, regardless of whether a game is chess with cash stakes or the purest game of dice. All operators, from casino giants to start-ups providing benign quizzes with token prizes, get labelled together. Payment gateways and banks are tasked with policing transactions. Promotion and advertising are erased at one stroke.

The approach is, one could argue, admirably simple. But regulatory maximalism often comes with a cost. By refusing to distinguish between forms of gaming — as the British do by requiring strong identity checks, age verification, and targeted problem-gambling interventions — India forfeits the possibility of channelling demand into safer, regulated spaces. Where gambling is banned outright, experience shows that it often migrates to the black market: less visible, less accountable, more dangerous.

To Ban or Not To?

What, then, should be regulated and what can safely be left to flourish? The answer begins with evidence, not ideology. Licensed online gaming operators, subject to robust oversight — using real-name registration, spending limits, and strong customer protection mechanisms — should be allowed to offer fantasy sports, poker, rummy, and other skill-based games for money.

The argument for prohibition weakens where adult choice and informed consent are real and where problematic gambling can be monitored and mitigated, not just prosecuted after the fact. Big data, after all, is better at detecting patterns of addiction than punitive regulations.

Genuine games of chance — online slots, betting on uncertain outcomes, unbounded lotteries — require the strictest controls, if not outright bans, when they are found to be correlated with harm. But here too, targeted interventions backed by a strong regulator are likely superior to blanket bans.

For social, educational, and e-sport games (including e-sports tournaments with performance-based prizes but no staking), the law should get out of the way. These are catalysts for creativity, digital literacy, and even international prestige.

India lacks neither the technical nor regulatory ingenuity to craft such a framework. What it lacks, as reflected in this Bill, is perhaps the patience to embrace calibration over control.