India’s connection to gambling is complex. The nation has a long history of games of both chance and skill – Teen Patti at family events, and the detailed use of statistics in cricket betting, for example – yet the legal rules for online gambling are broken, differ from place to place, and in a lot of India, don’t exist at all. The outcome of this isn’t that Indian people don’t gamble online; they do, and in large numbers. The outcome is that they do so with little in the way of legal safeguards, rights as customers, or any useful supervision.
The case for regulation isn’t about morals; it’s a sensible, practical matter. To ignore an industry won’t cause it to vanish. It simply means the industry will function as it chooses, without being held responsible, and those taking part in it will have nowhere to go if things go wrong.
The Present Legal Position
India’s gambling laws are mainly controlled by the Public Gambling Act of 1867, a law from the time of the British Empire which came over a hundred years before the internet. Under the Indian Constitution, gambling is a matter for each state – meaning every state is able to make laws about it on its own. This has created a variety of regulations: Goa, Sikkim, and Daman have given permission for physical and some forms of online gambling, while most other states operate under laws created when the idea of playing roulette on a mobile phone would have been unbelievable.
The Information Technology Act of 2000, and changes to it, don’t deal directly with online gambling, creating a legal area of uncertainty that overseas companies have made a lot of use of. Indian players can get to dozens of international casino sites with a simple search on the internet. These sites have licences from places like Malta, Gibraltar, or Curaçao, which don’t give Indian players any real protection as customers under Indian law.
The GST Council’s 2023 decision to put a 28 per cent tax on money put into online games was a significant step, showing that the central government recognises the economic facts of the sector. But tax without regulation is an insufficient answer. It takes in money, but leaves the gaps in customer protection entirely untouched.
What Happens Without Regulation
The lack of a proper regulatory structure has effects we can expect. If an unlicensed overseas site delays or refuses a withdrawal, an Indian player has no legal option within the country. If a site’s games aren’t checked independently to ensure fairness, players have no way of knowing if the results they are seeing show true probability, or software that’s been changed. If a problem with gambling develops, there’s no required structure for sites to offer tools for responsible gambling or options to exclude oneself.
These aren’t made-up fears. Stories of Indian players losing access to money they held on unregulated overseas sites are not rare. The companies involved are often registered in places that make legal action from India extremely costly and, in effect, impossible. The player simply takes the loss.
Beyond harm to the individual, the unregulated environment makes wider problems. Money going to overseas sites creates no tax income in India, makes no jobs for local people, and adds nothing to the Indian economy except the enjoyment it gives players. Illegal payments, used to get around the Reserve Bank of India’s rules on overseas gambling deals, make trouble for the banking sector to deal with, and a lack of clarity in financial flows which regulators find hard to watch.
What a Regulatory Structure Might Be
A number of countries have dealt with this issue successfully, and offer examples worth looking at. The United Kingdom’s Gambling Commission manages one of the world’s fullest licensing systems – demanding that businesses satisfy exacting requirements relating to fairness of games, safeguarding of players’ money, responsible gambling resources and advertising standards. Following 2019, Sweden’s licensing system brought into being a market controlled within the country where players were able to pick from a choice of licensed businesses, offering definite protection to consumers, and at the same time, businesses without a licence were actively prevented from operating.
India doesn’t require to copy any particular system. The federal structure, and the variety of the Indian market, would demand a system made to fit local requirements. But the main parts of any useful controlling method are well established: licensing of businesses, with real requirements for entering; independent examination of games and software; obligatory responsible gambling resources, including limits on deposits and self-exclusion; player money kept separate to guard against a business becoming unable to pay its debts; and a system for the settling of disputes within the country that Indian players are actually able to make use of.
A main controlling body, or a system permitting control at state level within a nationally consistent minimum of standards, would allow the industry to operate lawfully, while also making the accountability structures which do not presently exist. It would also give Indian players a real way of telling the difference between businesses which satisfy defined standards and those which do not.
At the moment, in the absence of a controlling system at home, Indian players depend on independent review platform to find new trusted online casino sites in India. This type of third-party detailed examination would in the end become less necessary with a controlling system at home, as the licence status of a business would be able to be checked through an official list.
The Economic Case
India’s online gaming market is among the fastest growing in the world. Calculations put the total market size in the hundreds of millions of dollars each year, with forecasts pointing to continued quick growth, caused by more people having smartphones, better internet infrastructure and a young population which is native to the digital world.
The economic reason for control is simple. A domestic market with a licence would produce a great amount of tax revenue – far more than the present method of taxing deposits while permitting the activity behind it to remain legally unclear. It would make real business chances for Indian business people and technology businesses. It would draw in international investment from businesses wanting to enter a market controlled with legal certainty. And it would produce employment across technology, making sure rules are followed, customer service and marketing jobs.
Karnataka itself has a noticeable technology and gaming industry. Bangalore is the home of some of India’s most advanced gaming technology businesses. A well-planned controlling system could put Karnataka and other technology centres in the position of centres of a legal, growing industry, rather than onlookers to one offshore.
Addressing the Counterarguments
The most common objection to control is that it makes lawful damaging activity. This argument has a natural attraction, but doesn’t stand up well against evidence. The countries with the most developed gambling control are not the countries with the highest rates of problem gambling. Research regularly shows that controlled environments, with obligatory responsible gambling resources, protection for players and looking after things, produce better results for players who are in danger of harm than uncontrolled ones where such requirements do not exist.
Prohibition, in practice, has not stopped Indian players from getting to online casino platforms. It has simply made certain they do so without protection. The moral argument against control would be more convincing if the alternative was truly no gambling. The real alternative, as the present situation shows, is uncontrolled gambling on platforms offshore with no rights for consumers and no accountability.
The Practical Path Forward
Progress on regulating internet casino businesses in India has been gradual, as the country’s government system, political issues and the real trouble of making a useful system for a varied nation of 1.4 billion citizens have caused delays. All of these difficulties are considerable.
However, things as they are aren’t harmless: each year regulation is absent is another year that many Indian people who gamble do so with a trade which does not follow the law, gives no safety, and is mostly hidden. Whether or not to regulate isn’t the real issue – the issue is how to do it properly, and how fast the political desire to begin can be located.