Is Online Casino Gambling Legal in India? The 2025 Ban Explained

PROGA defines an “online money game” as any online game where a user pays a fee, deposits money, or stakes something else in expectation of monetary return — and bans that category outright. This covers online casino games (slots, roulette, teen patti for money), online poker and rummy for money, and paid fantasy sports contests like Dream11-style platforms. Whether the underlying game requires skill is explicitly irrelevant to the ban; the presence of a monetary stake with an expectation of winning more is what triggers it.

PROGA created the Online Gaming Authority of India (OGAI), housed under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, to classify games into three categories: banned online money games, permissible social games (no real-money stakes), and e-sports (competitive gaming without betting, which the law explicitly recognises and allows to be promoted). OGAI must complete its classification of a given game within 90 days, and games it approves receive a certificate valid for up to ten years.

The ban applies specifically to online real-money games. Several categories remain legal: licensed physical casinos in Goa, Daman and Sikkim, which have historically operated under separate state carve-outs; state government lotteries; free-to-play social games with no real-money stakes; and e-sports without betting attached. This is a narrower list than many people assume — it does not mean gambling is legal in India generally, only that these specific, long-standing exceptions continue to exist.

PROGA’s criminal penalties — up to five years’ imprisonment and substantial fines — target companies and individuals who offer, operate, or advertise a banned online money game, not people simply playing one. That said, this is not the same as a guarantee that a player has no legal exposure at all: the Foreign Exchange Management Act (FEMA) separately prohibits outward remittances for lotteries and other forms of betting, which is a distinct legal question from PROGA itself and could affect a player actually sending money to an offshore gambling site. These are genuinely different legal questions, not one single settled answer for the player.

On 27 May 2026, India’s Supreme Court added an important layer: while playing a genuine game of skill may stand on different constitutional footing than a game of pure chance, betting or wagering money on that activity can still be regulated by individual states under their own betting and gambling powers. In practice, this means the skill-vs-chance distinction has not disappeared from Indian law entirely — it has just stopped being the decisive factor for the federal online-money-game ban specifically, while continuing to matter for how individual states regulate betting more broadly.

Separately from the ban itself, India’s Supreme Court in May 2026 upheld a 28% Goods and Services Tax applied to the full amount staked on real-money games, not just the platform’s commission — a significant departure from how the industry had previously calculated its tax liability. Authorities are reportedly pursuing operators for more than ₹1,00,000 crore in back taxes under this ruling. Winnings from legal gaming activity are also separately subject to a 30% tax deducted at source under the Income Tax Act, 1961.

Given that every online real-money casino game is now banned in India regardless of the operator’s foreign licensing status, and that offshore sites accepting Indian players through UPI or other channels are operating outside this framework by definition, we are publishing this page as a factual explainer of the legal position rather than a recommendation list.