Every age witnesses its own disguises of vice. Where once gambling announced itself with cards or dice, today it enters our homes through glowing screens, calling itself ‘fantasy’ or ‘skill’ and presenting the sheen of modern entertainment. For years this masquerade flourished in the shadows of legal ambiguity. It is for this reason that the Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act, 2025, marks such an important turning point, for Parliament has spoken with clarity that any online game played for monetary stakes is prohibited, and no operator may hide behind the fig leaf of ‘skill’.
The importance of this clarity becomes obvious when we recall the stories that filled our newspapers. In Indore, a 16-year-old girl began with free online games that seemed innocent enough. Before long she shifted to paid contests and in-app purchases, and soon found herself caught in a cycle of losses and distress. Psychologists described this pattern as ‘casino syndrome’, where the rare thrill of a win hijacks the brain’s reward system, compelling a player to keep returning despite repeated defeats. What her parents thought was leisure, was in fact gambling in digital costume.
For years, companies insisted that their platforms tested skill rather than chance. The courts had indeed recognised that games in which skill predominates stand apart from gambling. Yet what was meant as a narrow exception was stretched until it bore little resemblance to its origin. A fantasy cricket team could be assembled with care and judgment, but its fate might hinge on a tossed coin, a sudden injury, or the turn of weather. To dress up such chance-driven outcomes as evidence of skill was less a defence than a deception, and one that yielded vast profits.
Illustration: Deni Lal
The Act puts an end to this charade. It bans not only the games themselves but also their advertisements, which once glamorised online gaming as a path to wealth, and their financial facilitation, which enabled companies to draw users ever deeper into play. Crucially, it attaches real consequences: violations invite steep fines and even imprisonment. By striking at both the practice and the profit, the law does more than prohibit, it restores the integrity of the distinction between genuine skill and mere chance.
The need for such action is evident in the sheer scale of the harm, which has touched countless households and left deep scars across society. Behind these harms lie families discovering that savings have vanished, young men and women caught in the illusion of a single redemptive win, and communities grappling with the corrosive effects of addiction.
The Act, however, is not merely prohibitory. It preserves legitimate space for genuine e-sports, educational platforms, and social games. In this balance lies the wisdom that the Parliament is not hostile to innovation but determined to protect citizens from exploitation. Our Constitution protects freedom of trade, but it has never extended that protection to activities corrosive of public order and morality.
The principle now stands beyond doubt. Bharat will not stand by while its youth are lured into games that claim the dignity of skill but in reality amount to gambling in digital disguise. By stripping away this pretence, the Act has unmasked the wolf for what it is and reaffirmed a timeless truth, that while games may entertain and even inspire, gambling corrodes the individual and weakens society, and no nation that treasures its future can afford to confuse one for the other.
Bansuri Swaraj is the Lok Sabha member from New Delhi.