Betting and gambling activities are banned under various State laws, while few games of skill have been held to be constitutionally valid by the Supreme Court in various judgements. In this legal landscape, the online gaming industry in India has seen immense growth in the recent past. However, despite this existing legal landscape, various social and economic concerns have emerged from this industry over the past few years including:
(a) user harms in the nature of addiction-related concerns among children and adults, especially in terms of financial losses incurred by adult users due to such addiction;
(b) content-related concerns in terms of depiction of violent or inappropriate content, with absence of concrete measures to prevent children from accessing such content or real money games;
(c) ads of offshore gambling and betting websites targeting Indian users;
(d) lack of safeguards to secure users’ money and money laundering-related concerns in the absence of any strict KYC mechanism.
To address such concerns effectively through legal means, the Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) has introduced various checks and balances through relevant amendments to the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021 notified on April 06, 2023. The purpose of these amendments is to control the unabated and unwarranted negative impact of online gaming activities on users, especially children and other vulnerable sections of society.
