“Dice on the Sabha Floor”: Online Gaming, Dharma, and the State’s Tightrope

At the heart of India’s newest public quarrel—how to treat real-money online gaming—lies an older civilizational anxiety: what happens when play becomes peril, when leisure becomes leverage, and when the State, like a householder-king in the śāstra tradition, is asked to hold together the competing claims of liberty, livelihood, and public morality? If the proposed legislative push (and cognate executive action) to proscribe real-money gaming seeks to protect families from addiction, debt spirals, and the unutterable grief of suicide, the counter-claim is no less human: millions of hours of creative work, tens of thousands of livelihoods, flourishing esports sub-cultures, and a broader digital economy that has learned to speak Indian, code Indian, and—when nudged sensibly—also tax Indian.

In narrating the struggle between prohibition and regulation, it helps to begin not with a statute but with a story, and not just any story, but the story with which so much of our political vocabulary is haunted: the dice-hall in the Mahābhārata. The Pandava king, Yudhiṣṭhira, Dharmarāja himself, knows the practices of honour and the grammar of shame, yet finds himself bound in a logic of play whose stakes outgrow the game. He is not merely playing with dice; he is wagering sovereignty, and then, scandalously, personhood. It is an episode where law, custom, compulsion, and moral suasion jostle for space, each claiming to be “dharma.” The catastrophe of Draupadī’s humiliation—vastrāharaṇa—does not spring from the randomness of a die alone; it springs from an ecosystem of silence, from a Sabha which, in that hour, forgets the limits of play.

It is in this register that a modern Republic must locate its legislative instincts. Protecting the vulnerable is not paternalism; it is rajadharma. And yet, as every arthaśāstrin knows, rajadharma cannot be a sword that forgets the surgeon’s hand—prohibition, if chosen, must still be proportionate, reasoned, and built for the real world of incentives, not for the imagined world of compliance by edict. This is doubly true in networked markets where “illicit demand” rarely disappears; it migrates—often faster than the law can drive.

To be sure, India is not writing on a blank slate. The Court has given us a grammar, Parliament has created scaffolding, and the States have experimented for over a century with what the common law called “gaming,” what the śāstric mind saw as a temptation that the State must both discipline and, where possible, domesticate.

A civilizational lens: Krishna’s unsettling declaration

Bhagavad-Gītā 10.36 shocks modern sensibilities precisely because it refuses the dichotomy of sacred/profane: “Dyūtaṁ chalayatām asmi”—“Of those who are deceivers, I am gambling.” The point is not an endorsement of vice; it is a metaphysical nudge: power resides even in those human tendencies that we would rather excise than understand. To legislate, then, is to recognize that the propensity to wager—risk, speculate, play for stakes—is not a modern Western contagion but an abiding feature of human conduct. The Republic’s task is not to deny this nature but to discipline it, akin to how śāstra channels rasa rather than outlawing emotion.

Śloka presentation (inside the text, as requested):

Sanskrit:
द्यूतं छलयतामस्मि तेजस्तेजस्वि नामहम् ॥ (Bhagavad-Gītā 10.36)

Hindi (अनुवाद):
“मैं छल करने वालों का द्यूत (जुआ) हूँ; मैं तेज वालों का तेज हूँ।”

Transliteration:
Dyūtaṁ chalayatām asmi tejas tejasvinām aham.

Word-by-word:

• Dyūtaṁ — gambling/dice;

• chalayatām — of the deceivers;

• asmi — I am;

• tejas — brilliance/energy;

• tejasvinām — of the brilliant;

• aham — I.

Bhāvārtha (sense):
Śrī Kṛṣṇa is not anointing deception; He is revealing that even in domains we detest, an axiomatic potency circulates. The business of dharma is to harness power without being consumed by it.

In that spirit, the Indian State’s anxiety about online real-money gaming (RMG) is legitimate. Addiction is real; debt can be ruinous; predatory design is neither fiction nor rare. The question is not whether to act, but how: prohibition as talisman, or regulation as discipline? To answer, we must step into the jurisprudence.

The Supreme Court’s grammar: skill, chance, and the space of regulation

If one begins with the classic line—the 1957 Chamarbaugwala decisions—one encounters the doctrine that trade in pernicious activities (at the time, lotteries/gambling) is not an ordinary trade protected in the same register as, say, manufacturing shoes. The language of res extra commercium appears here and matures later in liquor cases; its normative thrust is simple: the State may draw tighter circles around trades it considers socially noxious. The exact phraseology in Chamarbaugwala is spread across multiple passages and must not be oversimplified; but the idea survives and is later reinforced in liquor jurisprudence (see Khoday Distilleries Ltd. v. State of Karnataka, where the Court upheld the State’s power to prohibit liquor trade outright). In Khoday, the Court summarized the position:

“The State can prohibit completely the trade or business in potable liquor since liquor as beverage is res extra commercium. The State may also create a monopoly in itself for the trade or business in such liquor.” Indian Kanoon

What this means in plain terms: For harmful trades, the State can regulate very tightly, even prohibit, and can run a monopoly. If the legislature classifies an activity as socially injurious, courts have historically allowed a broad canopy for State intervention.

But gambling is not a single species. When games turn on skill rather than chance, a different constitutional instinct kicks in. In State of Andhra Pradesh v. K. Satyanarayana (1968), dealing with the card game rummy, the Court wrote the famous passage:

“We cannot, therefore, say that the game of Rummy is a game of entire chance. It is mainly and preponderantly a game of skill. The chance in Rummy is of the same character as the chance in a deal at a game of bridge.” Indian Kanoon

Plain meaning: A game like rummy requires memory, strategy, and judgment; chance exists, but does not dominate. Therefore, rummy is not the kind of gambling the State may casually lump with games of pure chance.

In Dr. K.R. Lakshmanan v. State of Tamil Nadu (1996), the Court applied the same “preponderance” test to horse-racing:

“We hold and declare that horse racing is a game of mere skill… .” The Court explained that betting on horse-racing involves the bettor’s skill in assessing the horse and jockey, not blind luck. Indian Kanoon+1Nishith Desai Associates

Plain meaning: When the core of the activity requires developed judgment, the State’s power to impose blanket criminality is constitutionally suspect; the more tailored route is regulation.

At this point, a constitutionalist will recall that not all paternal regulation is forbidden. In K.A. Abbas v. Union of India (1970), the Court upheld prior censorship of films, precisely because cinema’s affective power is unusually potent—and because the Constitution allows reasonable restrictions under Article 19(2):

“Censorship of films including prior restraint is justified under the Constitution… the treatment of motion pictures must be different from that of other forms of art and expression.” Global Freedom of Expression+1Indian Kanoon

Plain meaning: Where the medium’s nature magnifies harm (or its immediacy), the State may act before the fact—but even here, the Court demanded guiding principles to prevent arbitrariness.

Thread these strands together and a template emerges: (a) if the activity is inherently pernicious, severe limits are permitted; (b) if skill predominates, criminal prohibitions must yield to calibrated regulation; (c) even where prior restraint is allowed (cinema analogy), guardrails against arbitrariness and vagueness are essential.

Online RMG sits in the cross-currents. Some formats are pure chance; others embed skill; many are hybrid and heavily “architected” by UX to induce compulsion. A blanket proscription, if framed, would need to be defended on (i) demonstrable social harm; (ii) lack of less-restrictive alternatives; and (iii) proportionality—tests refined by the Court in recent decades (e.g., Modern Dental College on proportionality; though that case is not about gaming, the doctrinal tool applies across restrictions on Article 19).

The Court’s applied skill jurisprudence also ripples into High Courts on contemporary platforms. Madras and Kerala High Courts have, in recent years, treated online rummy as skill-predominant, striking down overbroad bans; and the Allahabad High Court has extended the logic to poker in licensing disputes. CiteCaseThe Times of India

From the Sabha to cyberspace: black markets and the physics of prohibition

The Mahābhārata’s dice-hall is more than allegory; it is a case study in regulatory design failure. A king who could have framed the rules insists on playing under someone else’s terms. Cheating is not only possible; it is probable, because the framework relies on the virtue of Śakuni. The lesson for a Republic is this: when architecture is delegated to those with perverse incentives, prohibition is not medicine—it is the market signal to “go underground.”

India knows this beyond the gaming context. Liquor prohibition in some States birthed speakeasies and bootlegging; gold controls produced smuggling empires; fiscal caps in capital markets produced the havala and its kissing cousin, dabba trading—the unregulated black market in equities, commodities, and F&O, often running on encrypted chat apps, effectively short-circuiting SEBI’s entire architecture of surveillance. Recent enforcement drives show the phenomenon remains a live compliance headache; if anything, encrypted messaging makes the cat-and-mouse harder. TaxTMIScribd

Moral of the story: Where demand is elastic, blanket bans tend to deflect, not destroy, the behavior; the result is a parallel economy with zero consumer protection and zero tax compliance. The Sabha falls silent not because dharma is unclear, but because the architecture is naïve.

The economy of play: how big is the gaming edifice?

If the case for intervention is social, the case against a sledgehammer is economic. Mature jurisdictions have learned to fence the most dangerous edges while allowing skilled formats, with rigorous KYC, self-exclusion, affordability checks, ad rules, and ring-fenced tax channels. Consider a few anchors:

• United States. The American Gaming Association’s 2023 study estimates a $329 billion total economic impact of legal gaming, supporting 1.8 million jobs (direct, indirect, induced). While not all of this is online, the figure captures a mature regulatory ecosystem’s contribution to output and employment. PRS Legislative Research

• United Kingdom. The UK Gambling Commission reported £15.1 billion Gross Gambling Yield (GGY) in 2022–23 (April to March); industry estimates peg sectoral employment at roughly 100,000+ jobs across online and retail, and regularized taxes feed the Exchequer and public health funds. The Legal QuorumIndian Kanoon

• European Union. The European Gaming and Betting Association (EGBA) mapped €38.2 billion in online gambling revenue for 2022, with member codes requiring age checks, self-exclusion registers, and safer gambling tools. The EU focus is increasingly on harm minimization, not fetishized prohibition. American Gaming Association

• Singapore. The Remote Gambling Act (2014) prohibits remote gambling but allows narrow exemptions for state-linked operators under strict conditions—KYC walls, limits, contributions to social causes—an instructive model of channelization. singaporepools.com.sg

• Philippines. PAGCOR licenses and taxes online operators; the controversial POGO segment has waxed and waned under policy revamps, but the structure demonstrates a low-cost jurisdiction’s use of licensure as a fiscal and supervisory tool. mattosfilho.com.br

• UAE and the Gulf. The UAE’s new General Commercial Gaming Regulatory Authority (GCGRA) (2023) is building a greenfield regime from scratch, showing how a high-end tourism economy seeks to ring-fence gaming as part of destination strategy, even as neighboring jurisdictions remain prohibitionist on religious grounds. Betting & Gaming Council

• China & Russia. China bans gambling outside state lotteries, with Macau as a unique enclave; Russia cordons gaming into specific zones and polices online aggressively. These are public-order led models, not liberal market ones.
  
  

  
  
  
  

What about India? Government and industry estimates vary, but the online gaming market has been valued in the multi-billion-dollar range, with direct and adjacent employment running into the hundreds of thousands when esports, animation, ad-tech, and payments are included. Several reports, policy notes, and association statements in the last few years have toggled between 200,000–400,000 jobs at risk under harsh bans; tax collections from the sector have also been significant, especially after the GST Council’s 2023 decisions on e-gaming valuation. (Numbers vary year to year and by definition; hence the caution in attaching a single figure.) Industry bodies like the All India Gaming Federation and trade reportage often cite Rs 20,000+ crore in annual taxes and large cumulative investments at risk in the event of a blanket proscription—figures that need official reconciliation but are directionally instructive on scale. (These sectoral claims appear frequently in business press and policy briefs; the precise aggregates will need a Ministry-validated whitepaper.)

The editorial conclusion is not that “money must trump harm.” Rather, it is that a channelization philosophy—common in excise and gaming—mixes paternal care with institutional humility: you fence the edges, own the revenue stream, and move the consumer into safer, surveilled corridors.

A narrative comparison inside the essay (not a sterile appendix)

A fair-minded Indian policy, if it is to be civilizationally grounded and economically adult, must look outward without being derivative. Here, then, is a woven comparison—evoked as part of our argument, not a detached matrix.

United States (federalized pluralism). America’s genius has been to let States experiment. New Jersey and Nevada built mature compliance regimes for casinos and online formats; New York has gone heavy on sports betting; Utah remains prohibitionist. The AGA’s impact estimate (above) is not a celebration of vice; it is a testament to what legal channelization can produce in taxes, jobs, and consumer protection. The U.S. experience suggests that when you legalize with ID verification, self-exclusion registers, advertising codes, and independent monitoring, you push the black market to the margins—even if it never fully disappears. PRS Legislative Research

United Kingdom (unitary regulator, granular rules). A single Commission, a rolling rulebook. Affordability checks, VIP-scheme controls, limits on advertising, and a live conversation on loot boxes. The British instinct is to measure and then tighten. Yields are high (£15.1 bn GGY), but so are regulatory expectations. The Indian lesson: don’t legislate a monolith; write the Act, and let the regulator update codes at the pace of UX innovation. The Legal Quorum

Continental Europe (harm-minimization). EGBA members have normalized age-gating, deposit caps, algorithmic flags for harm, and mandatory breaks. The value proposition is not libertarian; it is public-health-first channelization. India’s public health system, already stretched, may welcome an industry-funded, regulator-directed harm-prevention levy. American Gaming Association

Middle East (selective opening). The UAE is mid-flight, building a regime intended to be surgical, high-end, and tourism-complementary. The rest of the Gulf remains largely prohibitionist. India’s constitutional culture and social fabric are different, but the UAE’s greenfield regulator shows how a State can design standards ex-ante when starting from zero. Betting & Gaming Council

Southeast Asia (Singapore/Philippines divergence). Singapore is the global master of narrow exemption; it bans the general case but authorizes specific operators behind heavy KYC and social safeguards. The Philippines licenses widely (PAGCOR) and experiments with offshore models; political appetite has varied in recent years given law-and-order concerns. The Indian hint: if you grant exemptions, make them scarce, supervised, and data-rich. singaporepools.com.sgmattosfilho.com.br

Russia/China (command-and-control). Their muscular policing has not eliminated underground play; it has pushed it into chat-apps and across borders, a cautionary tale for any large, wired society.

South America (Brazil/Colombia). Brazil has been regularizing sports betting and online gaming through federal legislation since 2023–24; Colombia (via Coljuegos) remains Latin America’s poster-child for regulated online betting with dedicated tax channels for healthcare. When States move from prohibition to regulation, treasuries and health systems often become constituencies for steady, clean revenue.

In the aggregate, three techniques recur internationally: (1) Channelization (not celebration): bring players to licensed corridors; (2) Real-time supervision via KYC, affordability, and ad-tech limits; (3) Hypothecated social funding—earmark a slice of GGR or platform fees for addiction services, research, and youth sport.

What does our Court’s language counsel for implementation?

Because jurisprudence must not be quoted like scripture without exegesis, here are the paragraph-format excerpts with plain-English takeaways for administrators drafting rules:

1. Satyanarayana (1968) / Rummy:

“It is mainly and preponderantly a game of skill. The chance in Rummy is of the same character as the chance in a deal at a game of bridge.” Indian Kanoon
Implementation positive: If you can objectively identify skill-heavy formats (memory, sequencing, strategy), a licensing model is constitutionally safer than a blanket ban.
Implementation negative: If the State paints all card-based online formats as “gambling,” it risks judicial correction unless it produces evidence that online mechanics have mutated the game into compulsion (e.g., speed, stakes, manipulative nudges).

2. Lakshmanan (1996) / Horse-racing:

“Horse racing is a game of mere skill…” with the bettor’s judgment at the core. Indian Kanoon
Positive: The State can permit wagering in skill-environments with surveillance (stewards’ rooms, doping rules, KYC at totes).
Negative: A knee-jerk outlawing of all wagering overlooks skill-mediated risk and invites challenge. Regulation that strangles skill-markets without evidence suffers from manifest arbitrariness.

3. Khoday Distilleries (1994) / Liquor & res extra commercium:

“The State can prohibit completely the trade or business in potable liquor…” Indian Kanoon
Positive: Where the legislature builds a record of social harm, outright bans are permissible.
Negative: Using res extra commercium as a wand to avoid proportionality analysis in adjacent sectors (like online skill-gaming) can misfire. The more correct approach is category-specific reasoning, not doctrinal seepage.

4. K.A. Abbas (1970) / Prior restraint & reasonableness:

“Censorship of films including prior restraint is justified… [but] must have clear guiding principles to prevent arbitrary action.” Global Freedom of Expression
Positive: The online gaming authority (if created) can demand pre-certification (game design disclosures, RNG certification, skill-versus-chance audits).
Negative: Warrantless search or open-ended takedown powers without clear thresholds risks invalidation; draft reasoned, reviewable triggers.

Dharma and design: the śāstra of proportion

Our dharma texts warn against two extremes: a sovereign paralysed by scruple, and a sovereign intoxicated by power. Yudhiṣṭhira’s righteous scruple morphs into misplaced stubbornness; Duryodhana’s intoxication with victory blinds him to legitimacy. The Republic must avoid both. Proportion is the via media.

In constitutional terms, proportionality requires that (i) the measure pursues a legitimate aim; (ii) it is suitable to achieve the aim; (iii) it is necessary (no less-restrictive alternative exists); and (iv) a balancing of rights and harms justifies the cost. A statute that promotes esports and social gaming while banning RMG will be measured against whether narrower tools—deposit caps, cooling-off periods, affordability checks tied to verified income, advertising blackouts around youth programming, strict KYC, self-exclusion registers—could have reduced harm without incinerating legitimate sub-sectors.

The cinema analogy is useful. In Abbas, the Court did not throw up its hands at cinema’s influence; it insisted on classification plus guiding principles. Online gaming is similarly graded, not monolithic. Esports tournaments with cash-prize purses are not the same as 24x7 micro-stake games with variable ratio reinforcement loops. A “one size fits all” penal blueprint is an aesthetic of administrative convenience, not a constitutional virtue.

International employment and GDP linkages—what scale are we debating?

Numbers concentrate the mind. Legal gaming’s contribution to GDP in the U.S. (AGA’s total impact figure: $329 bn; 1.8 million jobs) is a reminder that platform economies are labor-absorbing across the chain: coders, artists, live-ops managers, payments risk, compliance officers, event crews, broadcast commentators, league admins, and retail hospitality. The UK’s £15.1 bn GGY and ~100k jobs are similarly distributed across regions, with specific levies earmarked for public health and grassroots sport. EGBA’s €38.2 bn online market sits on top of robust consumer-protection toolkits. PRS Legislative ResearchThe Legal QuorumAmerican Gaming Association

For India, one can conservatively frame three contours of impact:

1. Direct tech employment (studios, platforms, esports orgs, ad-tech, payments).

2. Adjacent services (animation/VFX, data science, influencer ecosystems, shoutcasters, events, venues).

3. Fiscal linkages (GST, TDS, income tax, sponsorship taxes, ad-spend GST, cloud credits, and, crucially, a harm-levy hypothecated to addiction services).

Even if we do not force a single number, it is obvious that a ban is not a surgical incision; it is a sector-wide amputation, with ricochet effects—payments gateways lose volumes; sports federations lose sponsorship; OTTs lose ad-buys; State revenues take a hit; enforcement migrates to chasing offshore servers and Telegram cash-circles. (The parallel from dabba trading is instructive: when legal channels are choked, price discovery and speculation do not die; they migrate to the shadows, hollowing out taxes and amplifying consumer risk.) TaxTMIScribd

What might a dhārmic middle path look like?

It is easy to demand either “total ban” or “total freedom.” It is harder, but more ārya, to stitch a middle path that preserves the law’s intent while minimizing collateral damage. The architecture below is not leniency; it is seriousness made implementable:

1. Statutory triage by evidentiary skill-test.
   Codify a dominant factor test (Lakshmanan/Satyanarayana) in the statute. Require any operator seeking a “skill-format” license to submit an audited game mechanics dossier—RNG certification, pace of play, decision-density, persistence of skill advantage over 100/1,000-game horizons—with third-party labs attesting. Where the dossier fails, the format is deemed chance and prohibited.

2. Affordability & duty-of-care.
   Link deposit limits to verified income bands (Aadhaar-PAN seeded; federated KYC). Mandate cooling-off periods, session-length caps, and real-time nudges when behavioural flags fire (chasing losses, deposit bursts). This is the EU/UK line adapted for Indian KYC rails. American Gaming AssociationThe Legal Quorum

3. National self-exclusion registry (N-SER).
   A single, privacy-preserving register—opt-in by citizens; mandatory honour by licensees. Breach = license points and fines. Integrate with credit-bureau style consent dashboards.

4. Advertising & celebrity endorsement code.
   Borrow the cinema logic from Abbas: do not ban storytelling; classify and constrain. Total blackout during children’s programming; no “instant-riches” messaging; mandatory harm disclaimers; no endorsements by persons with disproportionate youth following.

5. Payments and AML choke-points for offshores.
   Create a negative BIN/IP list updated weekly; mandate that banks and PSPs block payments to flagged domains/UPIs. Escalate to cooperative blacklisting with global card schemes. Make willful facilitation a reportable offense with penalty slabs.

6. Surgical criminalization.
   Reserve the criminal sledgehammer for (i) underage onboarding, (ii) willful KYC evasion, (iii) manipulation of game outcomes, (iv) money-laundering, and (v) repeat abetment by ad-tech partners. For legitimate operators, administrative penalties and license points should be the default.

7. Harm-levy with hypothecation.
   A small percentage of Gross Gaming Revenue (GGR) ring-fenced to (i) NIMHANS-style clinics, (ii) research grants on addiction, (iii) community sport infrastructure. Make annual impact audits public. (NIMHANS’ work on youth addiction prevalence underscores the policy need; a levy can fund clinically serious responses.) Indian Kanoon

8. Esports sanctum.
   Shield pure esports (no staking by participants) as a youth-development sector—with prize-pool regulation, anti-doping-style spirit rules for cognitive enhancers, and safe-venue codes.

9. State option windows.
   Allow States to opt for tighter controls (as with excise), but bind them to a federal floor of due process so that businesses aren’t whiplashed by arbitrary municipal bans.

10. Sunset and review.
    Bake in a three-year review with Parliamentary committee oversight; metrics to include (i) helpline volumes, (ii) treatment uptake, (iii) illegal traffic blocked, (iv) tax yields, (v) employment movement.

This is not “softness.” It is constitutional toughness: the courage to regulate hard, with humility to measure and adjust. It keeps the legislative intent supreme—protecting families—while sparing the larger creative economy an indiscriminate winter.

Mahābhārata once more: Draupadī’s question as compliance principle

In the dice-hall, Draupadī asks a question that punctures sophistry: “Whom did you lose first, yourself or me?” The point is jurisprudential: by what authority does a player wager another’s personhood? Translated into regulatory design, this becomes: by what authority does a platform wager a user’s future? If the State establishes duty-of-care—affordability checks, red-flag interventions, and the right of a family member (with due safeguards) to trigger temporary exclusions—it re-centres the person over the platform. That is dharma without sermon.

A second Śloka, to hold the argument together:

Sanskrit:
यदा यदा हि धर्मस्य ग्लानिर्भवति भारत।
अभ्युत्थानमधर्मस्य तदाऽऽत्मानं सृजाम्यहम्॥ (Bhagavad-Gītā 4.7)

Hindi:
“जब-जब धर्म की हानि और अधर्म की वृद्धि होती है, तब-तब मैं स्वयं को प्रकट करता हूँ।”

Transliteration:
Yadā yadā hi dharmasya glānir bhavati Bhārata;
abhyutthānam adharmasya tadātmānaṁ sṛjāmy aham.

Word-by-word:
Yadā yadā (whenever) dharmasya glāniḥ (decline of dharma) abhūt (occurs); adharmasya abhyutthānam (rise of adharma); tadā (then) ātmanam sṛjāmi (I manifest Myself).

Bhāvārtha:
Restoring balance is the essence of rajadharma. The State’s appearance—through law—is justified when imbalance threatens vulnerable lives. But the avatāra is not apocalypse; it is calibration.

A brief word on privacy, searches, and arbitrariness

Where a bill contemplates warrantless searches or broad takedown powers in the online sphere, Abbas again counsels careful drafting: “clear guiding principles.” Reasonableness in Article 19(2)/(6) is not a ritual incantation; it is operational detail—who authorizes, on what record, with what review, for how long. Where measures trench on privacy, Puttaswamy’s proportionality demands evidence-based necessity. A search is justified where there is particularized suspicion of criminal design (bots, KYC forgery, money-laundering), not as an all-purpose convenience.

India vs. the world—integrated comparative narrative with employment/scale notes

To respect the request that the “table” lives inside the story, here is a textual tableau, each line a policy sketch with a scale note:

• USA: State-by-state; mature online sports betting/casino in several States; $329 bn total economic impact; 1.8 million jobs. Technique: ubiquitous KYC, self-exclusion lists, ad controls; muscular enforcement against offshores. Lesson: channelize, don’t fantasize about deletion. PRS Legislative Research

• Europe (EU/EEA): EGBA codes; €38.2 bn online revenue (2022); pan-EU pressure on affordability, cross-border self-exclusion databases; loot-box debates. Lesson: harm-reduction + data portability. American Gaming Association

• UK: Unitary commission; £15.1 bn GGY; ~100k jobs; white paper (2023–24) tightening affordability and product design. Lesson: dynamic rules over static Acts. The Legal Quorum

• Middle East: UAE GCGRA building greenfield regime; elsewhere largely prohibitionist. Lesson: if you will permit, start with gold-standard compliance and narrow corridors. Betting & Gaming Council

• Southeast Asia: Singapore bans the general case, carves exemptions; Philippines licenses widely (PAGCOR) but revisits offshores for law-and-order. Lesson: exemptions can be State-aligned and strictly shepherded. singaporepools.com.sgmattosfilho.com.br

• Russia/China: Enforced restriction; gaming pushes to jurisdictions/zones; high policing costs. Lesson: prohibition without channelization breeds jurisdictional arbitrage.

• South America: Brazil legalizing sports betting/igaming; Colombia demonstrates how a regulator (Coljuegos) can earmark taxes to health. Lesson: legalization can be fiscal-public-health positive.

• India (proposed posture): Public health intent clear and commendable; skill jurisprudence creates a constitutional seam for calibrated licensing; black-market risk is real (cf. dabba). Lesson: combine ban (for pure chance/predation) with licensed skill corridors under strict duty-of-care.

What is lost if we ban, and what is gained if we regulate hard?

Losses under a ban (directional, based on sector reportage):

• Employment: Tech/art jobs displaced; esports ecosystems hollowed; ad-tech and payments volumes shrink.

• GDP / Fiscal: GST/TDS streams evaporate; sponsorships (cricket/league sport) dip; cloud and infra vendors lose domestic anchor clients.

• Enforcement load: Resources shift from supervision to whack-a-mole with offshores and encrypted rings.

Gains under calibrated regulation:

• Harm-reduction: Affordability caps, KYC, duty-of-care, real-time flags, N-SER, and family-triggered cool-offs all bite into risk.

• Fiscal clarity: Tax buoyancy + harm-levy hypothecated to clinics/research.

• Legitimacy dividend: Players migrate to compliant corridors; industry internalizes public-interest as a cost of doing business.

A final jurisprudential braid: cinema, liquor, gaming

It is tempting to import Khoday’s res extra commercium into gaming wholesale and call it a day. That would be doctrinally blunt. Khoday belongs to a line where the object of trade (liquor for potable use) is itself the harm vector. Gaming, by contrast, is a composite: some formats are vice, some are sport, most are architecture. The Abbas instinct—pre-restraint but with clear principles—and the Satyanarayana/Lakshmanan skill doctrine together suggest graded legality. The State’s intent—to protect the vulnerable—remains supreme, but the technique is classification + regulation, not classification = outlaw.

If Parliament seeks to ban pure chance with money at stake—roulette-like mechanics, loot boxes that simulate wagering, speed-based micro-stakes with variable ratio rewards—that is both morally intelligible and constitutionally defensible, provided the evidentiary record is rich and the drafting, crisp. But if Parliament also wishes to preserve esports and skill-formats, then the way to do so is not by benevolent promises but by a regulatory constitution inside the statute: (i) skill audit benchmarks; (ii) affordability enforcement; (iii) advertising code; (iv) N-SER; (v) AML chokepoints; (vi) harm-levy; (vii) sunset review.

Epilogue in the Sabha

When Draupadī’s question freezes the Sabha, it is not because she has found a loophole; it is because she has rediscovered first principles. A polity that remembers those principles will neither indulge predation nor immolate productive enterprise. It will write a law that is severe where it must be and subtle where it can be.

If asked, then, whether India should prohibit or regulate, the dhārmic answer is: both—prohibit the pernicious, regulate the salvageable, and never forget that a Republic’s majesty is not in the size of its sword but in the craft of its scabbard.