New Bill To Regulate Online Gaming In India

As of the 1st of April 2022, The Online Gaming (Regulation) Bill was released in the Lok Sabha. What does this mean for online Indian casinos? This new bill will focus on regulating and ensuring the legitimacy of iGaming within India.

However, upon review, there were a few shortcomings within the new legislation. Let’s take a look at what this new bill means for online gambling within India, and where it falls short of upholding the law.

The Purpose Of The Online Gaming (Regulation) Bill 2022

As briefly mentioned above, the bill was presented as an attempt to preserve the integrity of the online casino market within India. This comes after a spike in online play within the country.

Last year, it was reported that the iGaming market within India grew to nearly $1 billion. Furthermore, it is estimated that this figure will grow to $3.4 billion by 2024. This can be accounted to the youth of India taking an interest in the iGaming field.

As it is, India is home to approximately 1.4 billion people.

The government sees the need to regulate the online casino market further. They intend to create a type of watchdog system, which will monitor both casino games of skill (table games such as poker and blackjack) and casino games of chance (slots).

The country also sees a need for this system to curb play at illegal online sites. Parliament wishes to instate an online gaming commission that will be solely responsible for checking on online casinos, regulating their fairness, and checking to see whether they comply with the Bill as a whole.

Where The Online Gaming (Regulation) Bill Falls Short

As previously mentioned, the bill does fall short in a few areas. The most notable is that it does not distinguish between real money games and casual games. This is an issue as the country is in need of regulations within the real money gaming sector specifically. Casual games are already monitored by numerous legislations within India.

Other issues which arose from the Bill are as follows:

1. A failure to address the need for Know Your Customer (KYC) norms
2. A failure to address the need for data protection of the customer
3. A failure to address the need for customer complaint systems

As you can see, if the country wishes to get this Bill passed, it will need to make a few key amendments.