Last week, we featured a piece which argued that India’s recent ban of real money gaming will likely give rise to money laundering and gamers going underground. In this piece, India’s Chief Economic Advisor, Mr V. Anantha Nageswaran whilst not denying the second order effects, defends the decision as a trade off for more structural social and economic benefits.
“The ubiquity of smartphones, the cheapness of data in Indian mobile telephony and the inherent human predilection for gambling have combined to create a monster of huge proportions.”
Indeed, legal apps on your phone offer a far greater friction free easy access enhancing the propensity, than any underground brick and mortar alternative. More importantly, he cites data to show the extent of this malaise:
“A report by Lumikai published in November last year on the state of India’s interactive media and gaming provides graphic details. The details pertain to the financial year ended 31 March 2024.
India added 23 million new gamers to cross 590 million gamers that year. India was the world’s second-largest market by mobile gaming downloads, 3.5 times larger than the US and Brazil. The average weekly time spent on games in India increased by 30% from 10 to 13 hours. Paying users were 148 million; 43% of such gamers were first-time earners in the age bracket of 18-30; 66% of them were from non-metro cities; and 44% were women. Also, 83% of users used UPI or digital wallets to make in-game payments.”
Given the staggering growth in UPI payments, the NPCI last month started disclosing data on digital payments which are quite enlightening about consumption trends including that for online gaming:
“It shows that monthly online gaming expenditure was around ₹6,200 crore in December 2022. This rose to a peak of ₹13,703 crore in July 2024. By July 2025, the figure was slightly over ₹10,000 crore per month. This equates to an annual run rate of around ₹1.2 trillion. Then we wonder why private consumption and household financial savings are not growing as fast as we would like to see them grow.”
The CEA argues that the decision to ban has been taken with a view to protect India’s demographic dividend i.e, India’s young population with immense productive power that needs to be protected, nurtured and channelised towards more productive areas.
“Jobs will go to those equipped with education, skills, attitude and mental as well as physical health. The consumption of ultra-processed foods, social media and online gaming—a deadly troika—threatens to erode India’s demographic dividend significantly.
…Apart from financial losses, suicidal tendencies and incidents, addiction to online gaming and social media usage renders humans economically unproductive and socially reclusive. When it comes to employability, it is far too easy to zero in on education and skilling as essential ingredients. That is not wrong, but what’s wrong is to ignore the contribution of the deadly troika towards wiping out the effects of education and skilling, thereby preventing their accumulation by the country’s youth.”
Consumption of ultra processed foods completes the ‘deadly troika’ referred to by the CEA along with social media and gaming. He wrote about in an another oped for the Mint earlier last month.
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