India has chosen prohibition. With Parliament passing the Promotion & Regulation of Online Gaming Bill, 2025, real-money formats, their ads, and payment facilitation are out, and leading platforms have already switched off cash play. The sports–media–tech flywheel that thrived on fantasy-led spend now faces a hard reset.
In 2004, I took up the responsibility of managing Tamil Nadu as the Area Operations Director at Coca-Cola India. Tamil Nadu had implemented a blanket lottery ban since January 2003. Courts upheld the state’s power to prohibit lotteries inside its borders under the Lotteries (Regulation) Act, 1998, so long as the state itself doesn’t run one. The moral argument was clear: protect vulnerable households from debt spirals by removing a high-risk product from everyday life. I remember we struggled every summer to put in place consumer gratification programmes in a low involvement, impulse category even as other markets across the country ran lucky dips, lottery games and under the crown gifts that buoyed sales.
As a values statement, the TN ban worked. Legal sellers vanished; the ambient cues to gamble disappeared. But bans create shadows too. Enforcement against illegal “number” lotteries remains a recurring headline – raids, cash seizures and ticket busts on the Coimbatore–Kerala corridor show how activity doesn’t die; it migrates.
There’s also a budget story. Tamil Nadu renounced a revenue lever that neighbouring Kerala embraced and scaled. Multiple disclosures peg Kerala’s lottery receipts at ~₹12,500 crore in FY24, with ~₹13,244 crore projected in FY25 (gross sales). Even if net margins are modest after prizes and commissions, the programme underwrites employment and steady cashflows. Moral choice or missed opportunity? The answer depends on what a state values,and how tightly it can police the perimeter.
The national prohibition on RMG lands in a far larger digital marketplace: hundreds of millions of gamers, a sports calendar that leans on shoulder programming, and ad ecosystems built around cricket tentpoles. According to an official “We’re a regional league, every rupee turns twice before it rests. Real-money gaming brands funded our programming, our content creators, even away-match travel. The ban doesn’t just pull a sponsor; it pulls the thread. If we can’t replace that spend fast, the first casualties are youth scouting and community clinics.”
In the short term, we can expect three TN-style effects at national scale:
- The “no-cash, no-ads, no-payments” regime upholds moral fabric. That’s a real win for household welfare. The state introduced strict policing all through.
- As in Tamil Nadu, activity can reappear offshore or in the grey market – beyond tax nets and safety nets. Read that as crypto led grey market boom.
- The sports economy loses a deep-pocketed advertiser cohort. Unless new categories backfill quickly, broadcasters, teams and creators feel the pinch.
However, Tamil Nadu’s experience offers a practical, middle path: keep the moral perimeter, but build gates with guards. Learnings from other countries show a path ahead – creation of a national self-exclusion register based on KYC for example. Or ban inducements and youth targeting. Or put in place montly caps and hard limits that are technically enforceable.
Sport thrives on predictability. The ban has delivered clarity of intent; now India needs clarity of execution. If policymakers pair prohibition with modern harm-reduction tools and, over time, consider licenced, tightly bounded carve-outs – the digital sports economy can keep creators employed, keep fans engaged, and keep money on-shore without normalising predatory play.
Also Read: Impact of RMG ban on platforms, athletes and franchises – A deep dive