Short version
Until 2026, Indian gambling law was purely a state matter - the Public Gambling Act of 1867 left each state to set its own rules, and most had no law specifically addressing online or crypto gambling, leaving offshore crypto casinos in a genuine gray area. That changed with the Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act, 2025 and its 2026 Rules, in force since May 1, 2026: a new central regulator (the Online Gaming Authority of India, OGAI) now prohibits "online money games" nationally. Offshore platforms remain difficult to block in practice, but the legal backdrop is no longer simply a state-by-state gray area - there's now an explicit central prohibition to weigh against it.
The older, state-by-state picture
Gambling sits under Entry 34 of the State List in India's Constitution, meaning each of India's states and union territories historically set its own rules on top of the 159-year-old Public Gambling Act. A handful of states - Goa, Sikkim, Daman - legalized certain forms of gambling, mostly land-based; most other states had no law specifically addressing offshore online or crypto gambling, which is the gap that let millions of Indian players use offshore crypto casinos without a clear law directly prohibiting it.
What changed in 2026
The Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Rules, 2026, notified by India's Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology and in force since May 1, 2026, operationalizes the parent Online Gaming Act, 2025. It creates a central regulator (OGAI), sorts online games into three categories - e-sports, online social games, and online money games - and prohibits online money games outright as a category. This is a significant shift from the older "state gray area" framing: there's now a central-level prohibition specifically targeting real-money online gaming.
Where offshore crypto casinos stand now
The practical enforcement challenge is real: platforms operating from outside India remain accessible to Indian users, and blocking them requires coordinated action across MeitY, the Reserve Bank of India (for payment processing), and internet service providers - a gap regulators have acknowledged openly. In practice, this means offshore crypto casinos continue to be used by Indian players even as the legal backdrop has shifted toward explicit prohibition at the central level, rather than the older ambiguous gray area. Treat this as a materially different legal picture than it was even a year earlier.
Tax treatment
Online gambling winnings in India are generally subject to a flat tax rate under Indian tax law, separate from any capital gains treatment that might apply to cryptocurrency transactions themselves. This applied under the older framework and isn't necessarily superseded by the 2026 prohibition, which concerns the legality of the activity itself rather than the tax treatment of any winnings.
Before you play
- Understand that India's legal picture changed materially in 2026 - older "gray area" write-ups (including much of what's published online) may not reflect the current central prohibition on online money gaming.
- Recognize that enforcement against offshore platforms remains inconsistent even under the new rules, which is a fact about enforcement, not a statement about legality.
- If you're in a state with its own specific gambling statute (Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, and others have seen contested state-level online gambling bans), that state law adds another layer on top of the new central rules.