India's Real-Money Gaming Ban Pushed Players Offshore, Not Out

One in roughly every ten former Indian real-money gaming users surveyed in Maharashtra say they now spend more than Rs 25,000 a month — not on apps registered in India, but on gambling platforms licensed in places like Curaçao, reachable only by working around the government's own block list.

What the ban was supposed to do

The Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act, or PROG Act, became law in August 2025 and banned online money games nationwide — not just betting and rummy-style apps, but the fantasy sports platforms that had grown into a multi-billion-dollar industry employing thousands of people. The law created a new regulator, the Online Gaming Authority of India (OGAI), and gave enforcement real teeth: app stores, payment processors, banks and telecom operators were all ordered to cut access to anything that qualified as an online money game. By the government's own count in Parliament, close to 8,400 gambling-related URLs and apps have now been blocked under Section 69A of the IT Act — the same legal provision used to pull down apps on national-security grounds.

The surveys say people didn't stop, they switched

CUTS International, a Jaipur-based policy research body, ran consumer surveys across three states to check whether the ban was actually working. The results don't look like a win. In Delhi NCR, the share of former real-money gaming users accessing offshore platforms rose from 68% before the ban to 82% after it. Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra told a similar, in places worse, story.

• Delhi NCR: offshore platform usage climbed to 82%, with daily access jumping from 3.4% to 42%
• Tamil Nadu: offshore usage reached 83%
• Maharashtra: offshore usage hit roughly 92%, the highest of the three states surveyed

Spending patterns shifted too. In Maharashtra, nearly a third of surveyed offshore users reported monthly spends between Rs 5,000 and Rs 9,999, and close to one in ten crossed Rs 25,000 a month. None of that money sits inside any Indian regulatory or tax net — it flows to operators licensed abroad, reached through VPNs (tools that mask a user's real location so blocked sites look reachable from somewhere else) and payment routes that are hard for Indian banks to trace.

Banning a market doesn't delete the demand for it — it just moves the demand somewhere you can't see, tax, or protect.

Why this matters beyond the gaming industry

For Indian readers, the stakes go well past whether someone can play rummy for cash online. The domestic companies that built India's fantasy sports and real-money gaming industry — employing thousands of engineers, designers and customer-support staff — have had to pivot their entire business models overnight or shut down, while the consumer activity the law aimed to curb has, according to this data, simply relocated to platforms India has no jurisdiction over. That's a familiar pattern in Indian tech policy: strict domestic rules on paper, paired with weak last-mile enforcement, tend to hand the market to the least accountable operators rather than the most responsible ones. You can see the same tension play out in debates over offshore crypto exchanges and VPN-routed content platforms — block the compliant local version, and a determined user just finds a workaround with none of the consumer protections the ban was meant to provide in the first place.

CUTS International's research director, Amol Kulkarni, has described the shift as an unintended side effect of the policy that deserves closer study, rather than proof the law has failed outright. His team's recommendation leans toward stronger consumer-protection and responsible-gaming safeguards running alongside enforcement, instead of treating site-blocking as the only tool available. A constitutional challenge to the PROG Act is also reportedly still pending before India's Supreme Court, so the law's final shape isn't entirely settled either.

What happens next

Don't expect the blocking numbers to stop climbing — MeitY has added to its banned-URL list every few months since the Act passed, and that cat-and-mouse game shows no sign of slowing down. The harder question these surveys raise is whether India eventually builds the one thing they suggest is missing: a workable, India-specific framework for the players who are going to keep playing somewhere regardless, with their money and data at least somewhat safer than on a Curaçao-licensed site operating entirely outside the country's reach.