Regulate gaming by all means, but drop the plan to ban ‘real-money games'
For one, it violates personal liberty and the freedom to pursue a trade or profession of one's choice. The proposed central law would encroach on states' rights as well. It would also set back India's burgeoning gaming industry, which has a minuscule share of the $3 trillion global gaming market.
If accepted, the government's justification for the move – protecting vulnerable individuals from the harmful effects of the activity it proposes to ban – could lead to serious constrictions of personal freedom and endanger a range of businesses from distilleries and motorsports to fast food outlets and sweet shops.
The efficacy of such as ban is itself a matter of debate. Even in China, with its 'Great Firewall' and strict online censorship, savvy online users can get around restrictions to access the content they want.
In India, where the political system and people's values abhor the idea of the 'thought police', the only effect of banning some types of online gaming will be to drive it underground and funnel Indian gaming business to foreign entities that are wholly beyond the remit of the Indian state for taxation or quality control.
Call it what it is
In its traditional sense the word 'gaming' means 'gambling', as exemplified by the term 'gaming house'. This is true of both legal pronouncements over the decades and the lexicons of those above a certain age who lack direct personal exposure to video games, a significant and growing genre of entertainment worldwide. Incidentally, it was in the pursuit of improving video game graphics that Nvidia developed the parallel-processing chips that power the artificial intelligence models of today.
Yes, there could be games so insidious that they justify the proposed ban for reasons of addiction, obscenity and the potential to cause mental illness. But this applies not just to games but to the videos and shows that people mindlessly binge on TV and streaming platforms as well.
The bill also stands in a legal vacuum. It carefully refrains from using the term gambling, because regulating gambling is the responsibility of the states and not the union government. The centre's ability to legislate on real-money games depends on the games in question being distinct and removed from gambling. If the online games that involve money are not a form of gambling, what is the government's objection to such games?
Since gambling is formally illegal in India, all extant online games that involve money are necessarily games predominantly of skill rather than chance. And these are perfectly legal, both for the entities that host the games for a fee and for those who play them. Any number of Supreme Court and high court rulings make this clear. (Incidentally, buying and selling futures and options in the stock market without any clue as to how an option should be priced is nothing but gambling, but is deemed perfectly legal.)
Why Article 47 justification is problematic
To justify a ban, the proposed bill cites Article 47 of the Constitution and the duty of the state to raise the level of nutrition and improve the standard of living and public health. If Article 47 does in fact prick the government's conscience, shouldn't its first instinct be to rein in lynch mobs, increase the capacity of suburban trains to prevent deaths on tracks, and fix the potholes that turn Indian roads into lunar landscapes every monsoon, rather than ban an infant industry with global potential and destroy hundreds of thousands of jobs in the process?
If Article 47 is accepted as the rationale to proscribe gaming, what prevents it from being used to ban drinking, smoking, risky sports, fast food, or for that matter anything else deemed unhealthy?
Gaming can be regulated. The best system of regulation is self-regulation that abides by government guidelines. The government says it wants to reduce the number of laws that constrain how people live. The current proposal directly contradicts this.
The government should therefore drop the move to ban what it calls 'real-money gaming' and instead focus on getting the contours of healthy regulation right. In countries that allow gambling, including online gambling, the rules often mandate measures to discourage excesses and addiction.
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