What is the role of the state? That is the first question I must answer before I even proceed to discuss the online gaming bill recently passed banning real money games. I can tell you what it looks like in this country - it is to bend to popular opinion and act like worried parent. If the child cries loudly, give in to their demands, if they don't cry do what is best in your own self-interest. India is paternalistic.
Whether or not something gets banned depends heavily on public perception, on pushback, on protests, on lobbying. The laws related to farmers was passed by both houses but was revoked because of public perception. No tax on agriculture income, no ban on alcohol or tobacco, proposal to reduce GST rates because the public will cry loudly. But Why is marijuana not legal? Why is prostitution not legal? Why is salary income to be taxed at one of the highest rates?
The state is not a parent acting in the best interest of the child, it is acting in the best interest of itself, which in practical terms mean certain interest groups, Elected leaders care for what public perception because they would in turn get depend on that very perception to seize power. If you were wonder what the stance of the current government would be or most modern Indian Governments, its to ask what the public thinks.
Let's look at some other statistics - Tobacco: ~1.35 million deaths/year, Alcohol: ≈ 0.55 million deaths/year, Road accidents: 168,491 deaths, High sodium diets: ~175,000 deaths/year. Do we need to ban these? Why hasn't it happened yet? On Road Accidents, there was an interesting comment made by a minister stating that we won't have driverless cars in India because the livelihoods of drivers will be taken away. The point is not to ban alcohol, tobacco, manual cars, fast food but is to show the low quality and paternalistic decision making.
Governments are not parents. Their role should be limited to the very basic of tasks - 1. Security of its Citizens. 2. Maintaining the rule of law 3. intervene only where markets fundamentally fail 4. Protecting freedom.
If two adults voluntarily agree to bet money in a game, it is not the government’s role to interfere. If two adults voluntarily agree to do whatever that does not harm or interfere with others it's not the role of the government to step in. If it does feel the itch to step in it should do so with minimal regulation, just to enforce contracts, maintain rules, prevent fraud.
For those that cite the people who lose all their live savings, who commit suicide - that's a true problem and we needed better solutions to help them. As per online research - A minimum of ~61 suicides can be directly linked to real‑money online gaming in recent reporting and the actual number is likely much higher, given reporting gaps and under-attribution in national statistics.
We who play, the companies, the government needed better solutions to help them but they were consenting adults who voluntarily decided what is best for their own lives and we must respect that. For the 1000s that have suffered over the years, today there are lakhs more that suffer. Companies shut, livelihoods lost, tax revenues shut in the hope that the 1% that might have failed will do something better with their lives.
Banning real-money games in the name of saving a few instead punishes the many. A free society must trust adults to make their own choices, even if sometimes they are tragic. The state’s role is to minimize harm, not to monopolize morality
Appendix on the numbers cited -
ChatGPT 5 -
Here’s a clean, numbers-first snapshot for India (annual, most recent defensible sources shown):
- Tobacco: ~1.35 million deaths/year. WHO’s India country data attribute about 1.35M deaths annually to tobacco use.
- Alcohol: ≈ 0.55 million deaths/year (order of magnitude). WHO’s 2024 update reports an alcohol-attributable mortality rate of ~38.5 per 100,000 for India; multiplied by India’s 2023 population (~1.438B) implies ~5.5×10^5 deaths. A 2020 Indian review also estimated alcohol-attributable deaths at ~5.4% of all deaths, a similar ballpark.
- Road accidents: 168,491 deaths (calendar year 2022). This is the latest official all-India total from the Ministry of Road Transport & Highways report released via the PIB. (National 2023 totals haven’t been formally published; 2023 figures quoted in the press are for highways only, not all roads.)
- Diet-linked (what you called “sugar / highly processed food”; broader “dietary risks”): There isn’t a single official all-India number summing every diet risk, but two anchors help:
- High sodium alone: ~175,000 deaths/year in India are attributable to high-salt diets (GBD-based estimate summarized by Resolve to Save Lives and echoed in Indian coverage).
- Context: Globally, diet risks (high sodium; low whole grains, fruit; high trans fat/processed meat, SSBs, etc.) are linked to ~11–12 million deaths/year; India is a large share of South Asia’s burden, but published India-only totals vary by method and are not consistently reported as a single figure. (For example, the 2017 GBD analysis provides country-level breakdowns across the separate diet risks rather than one India roll-up.)
Quick notes on uncertainty
- Alcohol: India-specific alcohol deaths are model-based. Using the WHO rate (38.5/100k) × India’s population gives ~554,000; using the Indian review’s 5.4% of all deaths yields ~0.5–0.55M—so “~half a million” is a sensible estimate today.
- Diet: “Sugar”/“ultra-processed” aren’t single GBD risk categories for national totals. Where India-specific estimates exist (e.g., high sodium ~175k), I’ve quoted them. For sugar-sweetened beverages, robust India-only death counts aren’t routinely published—global work suggests a non-trivial but smaller share relative to sodium.
If you’d like, I can put this into a one-pager with sources and a short methodology footnote you can reuse in your essay.
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