Published May 22, 2026 · By Editorial Team · 8 min read

India's PROGA Takes Effect: The Largest Online Gambling Market Just Closed

On May 1, 2026, the Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act — assented to by President Murmu on August 22, 2025 — entered force in India. The statute, known to industry and lawyers alike as PROGA, imposes a blanket ban on online "money games" across the country, with a narrow Goa-only carve-out and no transitional licensing regime. The largest single online gambling market in the world, by player count, has just been closed by federal law.

What happened

PROGA was passed by both houses of Parliament in the 2025 Monsoon Session and received presidential assent on August 22, 2025. The rules framework, published by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology in late March 2026, set May 1, 2026, as the commencement date for the operative provisions: prohibition on offering "online money games" to Indian residents, criminal penalties for operators and senior managers, civil penalties for payment processors and platforms that facilitate the prohibited activity, and a directive to internet service providers and DNS operators to block non-compliant domains.

"Online money games" is defined broadly. The statute captures any game played online for monetary stake where outcomes depend wholly or partly on chance, including fantasy sports formats that the Supreme Court had previously held to be skill-based. The drafting was deliberate: PROGA replaces the older Information Technology Rules framework that had treated rummy, poker and fantasy sports as games of skill and exempted them from anti-gambling statutes.

Parallel tax provisions, in force since October 2023 and now sitting alongside the prohibition, impose a 28% Goods and Services Tax on the full deposit value (not gross gaming revenue) and a 30% income tax on winnings from "online gaming" including cryptocurrency winnings. Together, the tax and prohibition stack make the legal economics impossible: an operator legally collecting deposits would owe 28% to the GST council before any gameplay, and a winning player would owe 30% on the gross winning amount before any losses are netted.

The Goa exception is narrow. The Goa Public Gambling Act, as locally amended in early 2026, preserves a state-level licensing regime for online gaming offered by Goa-licensed entities exclusively to residents of Goa. Operationally, this means the carve-out applies to perhaps 1.5 million potential users and requires geolocation-restricted infrastructure that no major operator has built. Practically, the carve-out has not produced a single licensed offering as of the May 1 commencement date.

Why it matters

India was, by player count, the largest online gambling market in the world. Industry estimates from the All India Gaming Federation and the E-Gaming Federation, drawn from app-store rankings, payment-aggregator volume and operator disclosures, placed registered Indian online gaming users at approximately 425 million in mid-2025, with an estimated 110-130 million paying users across fantasy sports, rummy, poker and casual betting. Gross deposits ran into the tens of billions of dollars annualised.

PROGA does not eliminate that demand. It removes the domestic, regulated supply. Dream11, the country's largest fantasy sports operator, suspended new sign-ups in early April 2026 in advance of the May 1 commencement and is publicly considering a relisting of its real-money product on a Goa-licensed subsidiary basis. PokerBaazi and the Adda52 group have signalled similar restructurings. The smaller, predominantly offshore-licensed real-money operators — including Curacao-licensed crypto casinos that targeted Indian players via Bengali, Hindi and Telugu marketing — face a different problem: continued service to Indian residents now constitutes a criminal offence under PROGA.

The crypto casino dimension is the under-reported piece. Curacao-licensed and Anjouan-licensed crypto casinos have aggressively targeted Indian players over the past three years, with payment rails built around USDT-on-Tron and INR-to-crypto on-ramp partnerships with domestic exchanges. PROGA's reach extends to payment facilitation: the Reserve Bank of India issued a circular on April 14, 2026, instructing banks and payment aggregators to flag and reject transactions to known crypto exchanges where the receiving wallet is associated with offshore gambling.

The black-market dimension is the second under-reported piece. India's offline illegal betting market was, prior to PROGA, estimated at roughly $130 billion annually by various enforcement and industry sources. PROGA removes the regulated alternative without addressing the illegal market. Historical comparators — the Telangana state-level ban, the Tamil Nadu enforcement experience, the Andhra Pradesh ordinance — all suggest that prohibition without substitution shifts demand into harder-to-monitor channels rather than eliminating it.

Who is affected

Indian residents — players, operators, affiliates and payment processors — are affected most directly. Players who had outstanding balances on domestic real-money platforms have, in nearly all observable cases, been able to withdraw to bank accounts before May 1, though several smaller operators have been slow to process final withdrawals. Players with balances on offshore crypto casinos have an additional layer of complication: withdrawal to INR via bank rail is increasingly flagged under the April 14 RBI circular, while withdrawal to a personal crypto wallet remains technically possible but exposes the player to the 30% income-tax liability on the realised amount.

Affiliates whose traffic was India-weighted have been hit immediately. Several large affiliate sites in the gambling and fantasy-sports verticals, including content brands with strong Hindi-language SEO positions, have either pivoted to non-gambling verticals or restructured their commercial relationships to focus exclusively on Goa-licensed (or to-be-launched) products.

Foreign operators with Indian books face a discrete legal exposure. PROGA includes provisions for the criminal prosecution of foreign directors and the seizure of assets located in India or in jurisdictions with mutual legal assistance treaties. Several large crypto casinos visibly geofenced India between April 15 and May 1, including Stake (via its Stake.bet variants), Roobet and several mid-tier Curacao-licensed operators. Others — particularly those whose corporate structures keep no Indian-exposed assets and no Indian directors — have continued service while accepting the regulatory risk.

What players should do

Indian residents should treat PROGA as binding and structural rather than as a temporary enforcement pulse. The statute is a federal Act of Parliament with criminal penalties; it is not a state ordinance that might be challenged in a single high court. Constitutional challenges, including on grounds of skill-versus-chance and on Article 19 commercial-speech grounds, have been filed and will be heard, but the prudent assumption is that the prohibition will remain in force through 2026 and likely 2027.

Players with outstanding balances on offshore platforms should prioritise withdrawal to a personal crypto wallet (rather than to an Indian bank account) and should retain documentation of the deposit and withdrawal history for potential tax assessment. The 30% income tax on online-gaming winnings is a separate liability from the PROGA prohibition and remains applicable to crypto-realised winnings.

Players considering continued play on offshore platforms should understand that PROGA criminalises participation as well as offering. Enforcement against individual players is likely to be selective and concentrated on high-value account holders flagged by payment-aggregator and exchange disclosures, but the risk is non-zero. The Goa-licensed alternative, when operational offerings appear, will be the only domestic legal option, and that pathway requires Goa residency verification.

Conclusion

India has closed its online gambling market. The closure is not partial, not transitional and not state-level. It is a federal Act of Parliament with criminal penalties, enforced through the country's payment infrastructure, with a single narrow geographic carve-out that does not, as of the commencement date, host any operational licensee. The 425 million registered users do not vanish; the demand they represent will be served, badly, by an illegal market that PROGA does not regulate. For the global crypto-casino industry, India's closure removes the largest single growth market of the past decade.