PROGA Act 2025 Explained: India's Online Gaming Ban

The 50-word version

The Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act, 2025 (PROGA) got Presidential assent on 22 August 2025 and bans all online money games — skill, chance, or both — where you pay to win money. E-sports and stake-free social games stay legal. The Rules took effect 1 May 2026. Offering a banned game carries up to 3 years’ jail and a ₹1 crore fine.

This page is a sourced reference, not legal advice. Every figure, date and section below is cited to the Act text, PRS Legislative Research, PIB, or a named law firm. It explains what PROGA says and what it means for an ordinary player who still has money sitting in a now-discontinued app. It does not tell you what to do in court, and it is not written by a lawyer. For a decision that affects you, consult a qualified advocate.

Why this matters to you, in one breath. If you are reading this because Dream11, MPL, RummyCircle, My11Circle, PokerBaazi, Zupee or a Teen Patti app suddenly stopped taking deposits and your balance is stranded, PROGA is the reason. The cash games are gone, a new deposit is now a crime for the operator, but your existing balance is yours to withdraw — operators were told to keep withdrawals open, and the RBI/NPCI rail rules in our 3 Patti withdrawal guide still cover that recovery.

What PROGA actually is, in plain English

The full name is a mouthful: the Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act, 2025. Almost everyone shortens it to PROGA (some writers use “PROG Act”). It is a central law — passed by India’s Parliament, not by any single state — and it does two opposite-sounding things at once. It promotes one kind of online gaming (e-sports and harmless social games) while it prohibits another kind outright (any game where you stake money hoping to win money). The promotion side gets the headlines in government press releases; the prohibition side is the part that shut down a multi-billion-rupee industry in four days.

Read the long title and the structure together and the logic is clear. The state wanted to keep India’s video-game and e-sports ambitions alive — a genuinely large export and youth-employment story — while killing the real-money gaming sector it had decided was doing social harm. So instead of one fuzzy “gambling” rule, PROGA sorts every online game into three named buckets and treats each differently. Two buckets are encouraged. One bucket is banned, with criminal penalties attached. The whole Act turns on which bucket your favourite app falls into, and for cash rummy, fantasy cricket, online poker and real-money Teen Patti, the answer is the banned bucket.

The Act is built on a single defining move that ended a twenty-year legal argument in one sentence. For two decades, Indian courts and state governments fought over whether a game was “skill” or “chance,” because a game of skill was usually legal and a game of chance usually was not. PROGA threw that distinction out for online money games. It prohibits an online money game “irrespective of whether the game is based on skill, chance, or both,” per the definition tracked by PRS Legislative Research. That one phrase is why rummy and fantasy sports — long defended in court as games of skill — were banned alongside the games of pure luck they used to be distinguished from.

Who is bound, and who is not

A point that confuses many players: PROGA targets operators, advertisers and money-movers — not the individual player who places a bet. As the law firm GaganLegal reads the framework, “the framework targets operators and intermediaries, not individual players,” and “no criminal liability attaches to player participation itself under the Act” (GaganLegal). You will not be arrested for having played rummy for cash. The company that offered the game, the celebrity who advertised it, and the payment intermediary that moved the money are the ones facing jail and crore-level fines. Keep that asymmetry in mind every time this page mentions a penalty — the three-year sentences below land on the business, not on you.

The legislative timeline: four days from Cabinet to law

PROGA moved through Parliament at a speed that itself became a talking point. Here is the dated sequence, each step confirmed against Wikipedia’s record of the bill’s passage and the PIB bill document:

• 19 August 2025 — The Union Cabinet approved the Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Bill for introduction.
• 20 August 2025 — The bill was introduced and passed in the Lok Sabha, the lower house, on the same day.
• 21 August 2025 — The bill was introduced and passed in the Rajya Sabha, the upper house, the very next day.
• 22 August 2025 — President Droupadi Murmu gave her assent, turning the bill into an Act (NewsOnAir).

So the entire journey from Cabinet clearance to a signed Act of Parliament took four calendar days, 19 to 22 August 2025. That speed matters for one practical reason: operators got almost no runway. There was no months-long transition window written into the bill’s passage, which is why the major cash-gaming companies suspended deposits within hours of the Rajya Sabha vote rather than over a planned quarter.

The Act being passed is one thing; the Act being enforceable is another. A statute in India often needs the government to formally “notify” it and to publish operating Rules before it bites. That second phase ran much slower:

• 12 October 2025 — MeitY released the draft Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Rules for consultation.
• 22 April 2026 — MeitY notified the final Rules and announced the Act’s enforcement (SCC Online).
• 1 May 2026 — The Rules came into force, giving the regulatory machinery — the Authority, the determination test, the grievance process — its operative start date (Drishti IAS).

That gap is the source of a lot of confusion in mid-2026 commentary. The ban existed from August 2025 — which is why the apps went dark then — but the full administrative apparatus only switched on 1 May 2026. If you read a piece saying “PROGA wasn’t even notified for months,” it is describing this gap, not contradicting the ban. The prohibition and the bureaucracy arrived on different dates.

One date worth memorising for any conversation about your stranded balance: the cash games stopped in late August 2025, so a balance you are trying to recover has, by mid-2026, been sitting for the better part of a year. That age does not make it un-recoverable — operators kept withdrawal channels open — but it does mean you should stop waiting and start the recovery process described later on this page.

How India got to PROGA: the road behind the ban

PROGA did not appear from nowhere. It is the end-point of roughly a decade of failed half-measures, and understanding that history explains why the 2025 Act is a blunt prohibition rather than a licensing regime. Each earlier attempt to regulate real-money gaming softly collapsed, and the government eventually concluded that the only mechanism it trusted was an outright ban.

The skill-versus-chance era (pre-2023)

For most of India’s modern gaming history, the legal status of a real-money game turned on a single judicial test inherited from the Public Gambling Act, 1867 and refined by the courts: was the game predominantly a game of skill or a game of chance? A game of skill was treated as legitimate trade protected under the Constitution, while a game of chance was gambling and could be banned by states. Operators built entire businesses on the skill side of that line — rummy, fantasy sports and poker were all defended, often successfully, as games of skill in which the better-informed, more-practised player wins over time.

The problem was that the test was slippery and the states disagreed. One high court would hold online rummy to be a game of skill; another state would ban it outright. A fantasy-sports product legal in Maharashtra might be unlawful in Telangana. Operators lived in a patchwork where the same app was simultaneously legal and illegal across India’s map. That uncertainty is the grey zone PROGA was written to end.

The 2023 IT Rules amendment: the self-regulation experiment that failed

The first serious central attempt to bring order came in April 2023, when MeitY amended the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules. The 2023 amendment proposed a co-regulatory model: MeitY would recognise one or more self-regulatory bodies (SRBs), and those industry-led bodies would verify which real-money games were “permissible,” per the IMPRI analysis. The idea was to let the industry police itself under government oversight, with the SRBs certifying that a game was a permitted skill-based product and not gambling.

It never worked. As the law firm Mondaq records, no self-regulatory body was ever registered under the 2023 framework (Mondaq). MeitY itself concluded that industry-controlled SRBs might lack the neutrality and independence needed, given how dominated the sector was by a handful of large operators. The co-regulatory experiment quietly died before it ever became operational. That failure mattered: it convinced the government that a soft, industry-led model could not be trusted to draw the line, which pushed it toward a hard statutory one.

The 28% GST shock (October 2023)

Running in parallel was the tax fight. In 2023, the GST Council decided that online money gaming would attract 28% GST on the full face value of deposits — not on the operator’s margin, but on the entire amount a player put in. The change took effect from 1 October 2023. For an industry whose unit economics assumed GST on a much smaller base, taxing the full deposit was a financial earthquake; it compressed margins hard and signalled that the state now viewed real-money gaming as something closer to gambling than to a normal digital service. The 28% GST did not ban anything, but it reframed the sector’s standing in the government’s eyes, and it sits directly upstream of the 2025 decision to prohibit.

From grey zone to guardrails: why prohibition won

By 2024 and 2025, the government had tried the judicial test (too fragmented), self-regulation (never launched), and punitive taxation (squeezed margins but did not stop the social harms it worried about — addiction, debt, youth exposure, money-laundering risk). Bar & Bench framed the shift bluntly as a move “from grey zones to guardrails” (Bar & Bench). The political conclusion was that nothing short of a central prohibition with criminal teeth would actually end real-money gaming. PROGA is that conclusion written into law: it does not try to license or tax the sector into good behaviour, it simply removes it, while keeping a clearly-defined legal lane open for e-sports and social games.

The one-line history: India tried to draw the skill-versus-chance line in court (too messy), tried to let the industry draw it (the SRBs never registered), and tried to tax the sector into shape (28% GST from October 2023). When none of that ended the harms the state worried about, it banned online money games outright. PROGA is the prohibition that follows three failed attempts at moderation.

The three categories: the heart of the whole Act

Everything in PROGA flows from how it sorts online games into three defined classes. Get the bucket right and the legal consequence is automatic. Here is each category, defined precisely, with the line that decides it.

Category 1 — Online money games (BANNED)

This is the class PROGA exists to kill. An online money game is defined — in the language tracked by PRS and the Act — as an online game where a user pays money or other stakes in expectation of receiving monetary or other enrichment in return. Two ingredients must both be present, per the Section 2(1)(g) test summarised by GaganLegal: (a) the user pays “fees, deposited money or other stakes,” and (b) the user has an “expectation of winning … monetary and other enrichment in return.” Crucially, “other stakes” expressly includes credits, coins and tokens that are equivalent or convertible to money — so dressing a wager up as “chips” or “gold” does not escape the definition.

The decisive clause is the one that ended the skill-versus-chance debate. The definition applies “irrespective of whether the game is based on skill, chance, or both.” That is why the following all fall inside the banned category:

• Real-money rummy (RummyCircle, Junglee Rummy, My11Circle’s rummy) — long argued to be a game of skill, now banned because it is an online money game.
• Fantasy sports (Dream11, My11Circle) — pay an entry fee, win a cash prize: an online money game.
• Online poker (PokerBaazi, Adda52) — skill defence irrelevant under PROGA.
• Real-money Teen Patti / 3 Patti card apps — chance-heavy and money-staked, squarely banned.
• Online card and casino-style money games of every kind.

If your app lets you deposit rupees, play, and withdraw winnings, it is an online money game and it is prohibited. There is no “but it’s skill” exception left. For the rummy-specific version of this analysis, our is rummy legal in India explainer walks the before-and-after in detail.

Two definitional edges are worth nailing down, because operators tried to design around them and PROGA closed the gaps:

• “Money or other stakes” is broad on purpose. The Act does not only catch rupees. It expressly reaches “credits, coins and tokens” that are equivalent or convertible to money. That language exists because the obvious workaround — call the wager “gold coins” or “chips” rather than money — was already common across Teen Patti and card apps. If your in-game currency can be bought with money and cashed out for money, staking it is staking money, and the game is caught. A purely cosmetic, non-convertible in-game currency is different; the convertibility is the trigger.
• “Expectation of enrichment” is what separates a money game from a social game. A social game can charge a fee — a subscription, a one-time unlock — without becoming a money game, because you pay to access the game, not to win money back from it. The instant the design adds an expectation of a monetary or other enrichment return for your stake, it crosses into the banned category. Paying ₹99 to unlock a puzzle pack is a social game; paying ₹99 into a pot hoping to win ₹500 is a money game. The presence or absence of that “win money back” expectation is the whole test.

These two edges are also where the Online Gaming Authority of India will spend most of its time, because the hard cases — a rewards wheel that pays convertible points, a fantasy product restyled as a “free” game with paid boosts — sit exactly on those lines.

Category 2 — E-sports (PERMITTED, and actively promoted)

PROGA carves out e-sports as legitimate and even encourages it. An e-sport is defined as an online game where the outcome is determined solely by factors such as physical dexterity, mental agility, strategic thinking or similar skills, played as organised competitive events in a multiplayer format, governed by predefined rules. Think competitive titles played in tournaments — the structured, spectator-facing competitive gaming the government wants India to grow as an industry.

The line that keeps e-sports legal is sharp: an e-sport may involve registration fees and prize money, but must not involve the placing of bets or other stakes on the outcome. That distinction is everything. Paying a registration fee to enter a tournament and winning prize money for performing well is permitted. Betting on who will win that tournament is not. So an e-sports event is lawful; an “e-sports betting” product wrapped around it is an online money game and is banned. The Act also ties recognised e-sports to the National Sports Governance Act, 2025 framework, treating them closer to organised sport than to gambling.

Category 3 — Online social games (PERMITTED)

The third bucket is online social games — games offered solely for recreation, entertainment or skill development. These may charge a subscription or one-time access fee, but they must not involve any stakes or monetary gains. A casual puzzle game, a free-to-play strategy game, a game you pay a monthly subscription for but cannot “cash out” of — these are social games and are legal. The instant a social game lets you stake money for a monetary return, it stops being a social game and becomes an online money game, which flips it into the banned bucket.

The three-bucket logic in one line: pay-to-enter a skill tournament for prize money = e-sport (legal); pay a subscription to play for fun with no cash-out = social game (legal); pay money or convertible tokens hoping to win money = online money game (banned), skill or chance, no exceptions. Every real-money rummy, poker, fantasy and Teen Patti app sits in that third bucket, which is why they all went dark together.

A subtle gap worth flagging, because commentators have: gamification — loyalty points, spin-the-wheel rewards, in-app “coins” in non-gaming apps — sits in an uncertain zone, since “other stakes” includes convertible tokens. Where exactly an e-commerce reward wheel ends and a money game begins is one of the unresolved edges the Authority will have to rule on case by case.

The criminal penalties: who goes to jail and for how long

PROGA is not a civil licensing regime with fines you shrug off. It attaches criminal penalties — imprisonment plus crore-level fines — to three distinct activities. The figures below are drawn from the PRS bill tracker and corroborated across multiple law-firm readings.

Penalty 1 — Offering an online money game

Anyone who offers, or aids the offering of, an online money game or online money gaming service faces imprisonment of up to 3 years, or a fine of up to ₹1 crore, or both. This is the core operator offence. It is the provision that made it legally impossible for Dream11, MPL, RummyCircle, PokerBaazi and the rest to keep their cash products running — continuing to offer the game after the ban exposed the company and its officers to a three-year sentence.

Penalty 2 — Advertising an online money game

Anyone who makes, or causes to be made, an advertisement for an online money game faces imprisonment of up to 2 years, or a fine of up to ₹50 lakh, or both. This is aimed squarely at the marketing ecosystem — the surrogate ads, the influencer promotions, the celebrity endorsements that blanketed Indian cricket broadcasts for years. A public-interest petition before the Supreme Court (discussed below) specifically targets celebrity endorsements of these platforms, so the advertising offence has real teeth.

Penalty 3 — Facilitating the money (the bank/payment offence)

Anyone who engages in, or authorises, a financial transaction connected to an online money game faces imprisonment of up to 3 years, or a fine of up to ₹1 crore, or both. This is the quiet but powerful provision. It reaches banks, payment gateways and intermediaries that process deposits into banned games. By criminalising the plumbing, PROGA does not need to chase every offshore operator — it simply makes it illegal for any Indian payment rail to fund one. That is the legal mechanism that strangles a banned game’s deposit flow at the source.

Repeat offenders and the arrest power

The Act escalates hard for repeat conviction. A person convicted again of the offering or financial-facilitation offence faces a minimum of 3 years and up to 5 years’ imprisonment, plus a fine of not less than ₹1 crore and up to ₹2 crore. The second strike carries a mandatory floor, not just a ceiling.

And the offences carry real enforcement weight: the offering offence and the financial-facilitation offence are classified as cognizable and non-bailable under the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023. “Cognizable” means police can arrest without a warrant; “non-bailable” means bail is at the court’s discretion rather than a right. That classification signals how seriously the state treats these two offences.

Penalty table you can quote:

Offence	Max imprisonment	Max fine	Repeat offence
Offering an online money game	3 years	₹1 crore	3–5 years, ₹1–2 crore
Advertising an online money game	2 years	₹50 lakh	—
Facilitating funds (banks/payment)	3 years	₹1 crore	3–5 years, ₹1–2 crore

None of these penalties apply to the player. They apply to the operator, the advertiser and the money-mover. There were zero player-facing prison terms written into PROGA’s offence provisions.

The Online Gaming Authority of India

PROGA does not just ban things; it builds a regulator to run the permitted side and police the line. That body is the Online Gaming Authority of India (OGAI), established under the Act and fleshed out by the 2026 Rules. (Note: some early summaries, including parts of Wikipedia, used a working label like “National Online Gaming Commission”; the Act and the notified Rules use Online Gaming Authority of India — see GaganLegal and Drishti IAS.)

What it is and who sits on it

The OGAI is set up as an attached office of MeitY, headquartered in Delhi, and designed to run as a digital-first body. It is deliberately compact — a six-member coordination body rather than a large sectoral regulator. Per the Rules (Rule 3), it is chaired by the Additional Secretary, MeitY (ex officio), with five members at Joint Secretary rank drawn from:

• the Ministry of Home Affairs,
• the Department of Financial Services (Finance),
• the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting,
• the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports, and
• the Department of Legal Affairs (Law and Justice).

GaganLegal describes this as “a coordination model rather than a sectoral-regulator model” — the design integrates home-affairs, finance, broadcasting, sport and legal perspectives into one table rather than creating a standalone gaming regulator.

What it does

The Authority’s functions, per the Act and Rules, include:

• Maintaining and publishing the list of what counts as an online money game.
• Running the “determination” test — deciding, on its own initiative or on application, whether a specific game is a banned online money game. Per Rule 10, this determination should be completed within 90 days (as far as practicable) of a complete application, with the clock pausing for applicant-caused delays.
• Recognising, categorising and registering e-sports and social games.
• Issuing directions, orders and codes of practice to anyone offering, organising or facilitating an online game.
• Hearing complaints and appeals, and coordinating with financial institutions and law-enforcement to enforce the ban.
• Imposing penalties up to ₹2 crore for non-compliance with its directions.

The Authority is given civil-court powers — it can summon people, demand documents and issue enforceable orders. So it is not a toothless advisory panel; it is the body that will draw the contested lines (is this gamification a money game?) and back its rulings with real sanctions.

The grievance and appeal route

For ordinary users, the Rules build a two-tier grievance mechanism. First, you complain to the operator, which must run a functional grievance-redressal process (Rule 20) and resolve within a set window. If unresolved, the matter escalates to the Authority, which decides within 30 days; a user still dissatisfied can appeal to the Secretary, MeitY (Rule 7 and Rule 20). All of it runs digitally. This matters for balance recovery: if a permitted social-game or e-sports operator mishandles your account, there is now a defined ladder. For a banned money game’s stranded balance, though, your stronger lever is the payment-rail dispute process in our withdrawal guide, because that runs through RBI-regulated banks rather than through a discontinued operator.

What changed for players and operators

The Act reads as dry law; the change on the ground was abrupt. Here is what actually shifted on each side of the table.

For operators: deposits off, withdrawals on, products gone

Within hours of the Rajya Sabha vote on 21 August 2025, India’s biggest real-money operators began suspending cash play and disabling deposits. Reporting by MediaNama and others documented the wave:

• Dream11 — the fantasy-sports giant — shut its money-based contests.
• MPL (Mobile Premier League) — suspended all cash gaming and stopped new deposits, while keeping withdrawals open.
• Games24x7 — which runs RummyCircle and My11Circle — halted deposits and began phasing out real-money services.
• PokerBaazi — disabled deposits.
• Zupee, Gameskraft and others — wound down real-money operations in the same window.

The consistent pattern: deposits off immediately, withdrawals kept open so users could pull existing balances. Every major platform publicly reassured users that wallet balances were safe and withdrawable (Mondaq). That is the single most important operational fact for anyone with a stranded balance: the companies did not freeze your money on the way out; they froze your ability to add more.

For operators that survive, the pivot is toward the permitted categories — e-sports, free-to-play social games, subscription titles — and toward compliance duties under the Rules: a designated point of contact (Rule 16), a grievance mechanism (Rule 20), and user-safety features like age verification, time restrictions and parental controls (Rule 23).

For players: the cash product vanished, the money did not

For a player, three things changed at once.

First, you can no longer legally deposit into a real-money game. A new deposit is the operator’s crime, not yours, but the deposit rails are closed — which is why you physically cannot add money to “unlock” anything. Anyone who tells you to deposit to release a withdrawal is running a scam; never do it.

Second, your winnings tax did not disappear. Even on a wind-down balance, the operator must still deduct 30% TDS on net winnings under Section 194BA before paying you out, with no minimum threshold. So a recovery payout that arrives 30% lighter than your on-screen winnings is tax, not theft — the full mechanics, with worked examples, are in our TDS on online gaming explainer. The 28% GST that used to sit on your deposits is moot now, since you can no longer deposit.

Third, your existing balance became a recovery problem, not a gameplay problem. The app you used may have removed its games, changed its branding, or pivoted to a free-play product, but the obligation to return your money rides on the payment system, which is RBI-regulated. That is your leverage, and the next-to-last section explains how to use it.

The player’s bottom line: PROGA did not confiscate your balance. It killed the game and closed the deposit door, while leaving the withdrawal door open. Your job in 2026 is to walk through that withdrawal door before the operator’s wind-down support thins out — not to keep feeding a dead account.

The economics: what the ban actually cost

PROGA did not just rearrange a niche. It deleted one of India’s larger digital industries in a single quarter, and the numbers are worth stating plainly, because they explain both the litigation and the offshore migration risk discussed further down.

Before the ban, the Indian online-gaming sector was valued at roughly ₹35,000 crore (2024), of which real-money gaming made up about 85–86% of revenue — the cash games were the business; everything else was a rounding error (Drishti IAS editorial). India is the world’s second-largest gaming market after China, with over 488 million gamers, so this was not a fringe sector being trimmed.

The fiscal contribution was substantial. Driven by 28% GST on deposits and 30% TDS on net winnings, the real-money gaming industry was contributing an estimated ₹20,000–22,000 crore a year to the exchequer. That is the awkward fact at the centre of the policy: the same activity the government decided was socially harmful was also a sizeable tax source. Banning it meant accepting the revenue loss as the price of ending the harm.

The wind-down hit fast and hard. Within roughly 90 days of Parliament passing PROGA, the industry recorded write-downs of more than ₹7,000 crore and over 7,000 job losses, per Storyboard18. Industry estimates put the wider damage higher — revenue losses around ₹10,000 crore, a ₹3,600-crore GST shortfall, and roughly a ₹2,000-crore hit to TDS and income-tax collections. The broader skill-gaming workforce, estimated near two lakh (200,000) people, contracted sharply; Gameskraft alone reportedly cut its headcount from about 600 to under 100.

For an ordinary player, this matters in one concrete way: it tells you the operators are under genuine financial pressure during the wind-down. A company writing down crores and shedding staff has thinner support and a fast-shrinking team handling balance recovery. That is the practical argument for recovering your balance sooner rather than later — wind-down support desks do not get better over time, and a year-old stranded balance is harder to chase than a fresh one.

The economic verdict, sourced: PROGA erased a roughly ₹30,000-crore real-money sector that paid ₹20,000-crore-plus in annual tax and employed up to two lakh people, accepting all of that as the cost of prohibition. The litigation in the Supreme Court is, at its core, an argument about whether that destruction of a lawful business was constitutionally permissible.

The IT-blocking power: how a banned app actually disappears

One PROGA provision is easy to miss but does a lot of the real-world work: the central government’s power to block information and access related to online money gaming services. This is the technical mechanism that takes a banned app off Indian phones, and it leans on India’s existing internet-blocking machinery under the Information Technology Act, 2000.

In practice, MeitY can direct internet service providers and app stores to block access to a money-gaming service, the same way it blocks other unlawful content. This is why a banned app does not just stop legally — it can be made to vanish from the Play Store and to stop resolving on Indian networks. The blocking power is also why the financial-facilitation offence matters so much: between blocking the access and criminalising the payment, the government can choke a domestic operator from two directions at once — users cannot reach it, and money cannot reach it.

The limit of this power is geography. Blocking works cleanly against a domestic, app-store-listed operator. It works far less cleanly against an offshore site that simply spins up a new mirror domain the moment the old one is blocked — which is the enforcement gap the next section is about, and the single biggest danger PROGA created for ordinary players.

The wind-down: how to read a discontinued app in 2026

Because the shutdown was so fast, the apps you remember are in varied states a year later. Some kept a stripped-down withdrawal flow; some rebranded to a free-play product; some went quiet. Here is how to think about the major names, framed around recovery rather than play. None of this is a recommendation to use any of them — the cash products are illegal — it is purely a map for getting an old balance out.

Dream11 / My11Circle (fantasy)

Fantasy cash contests are gone. Dream11 publicly committed to letting users withdraw existing balances. Treat any remaining balance as a withdrawal-only recovery: complete KYC if prompted, request the payout to a bank account or UPI ID in your own name that matches your PAN, and expect a 30% TDS deduction on net winnings. If the payout stalls on the rail, work it as a payment dispute, not a gaming complaint.

RummyCircle / Junglee Rummy (rummy)

Real-money rummy is banned. RummyCircle (Games24x7) and Junglee Rummy discontinued cash games. Recovery follows whatever withdrawal flow the operator left running. Two recurring snags carried over from how these apps always worked: PAN must match your KYC exactly (one transposed letter parks the payout), and Junglee historically enforced KYC at the first withdrawal or once cumulative deposits crossed ₹50,000. Get KYC clean first, then request the payout. Our is rummy legal in India page covers the legal status in full.

PokerBaazi / Adda52 (poker)

Online poker for money is banned. PokerBaazi disabled deposits and kept withdrawals open in the wind-down. Same recovery posture: KYC-clean, own-name account, expect TDS, dispute on the rail if it stalls.

MPL / Zupee (mixed real-money)

MPL suspended cash gaming and stopped new deposits while continuing to allow withdrawals of existing balances. Zupee wound down its real-money operations. Recover the balance through the remaining withdrawal channel; do not attempt to re-deposit.

Real-money Teen Patti / 3 Patti card apps

These informal-brand card apps are squarely online money games and are banned. Many were distributed outside the Play Store and have less authoritative support, which makes recovery harder and scams more common. The detailed, app-agnostic recovery ladder — including the NPCI dispute path and copy-paste complaint templates — lives in our 3 Patti withdrawal guide. Be especially wary of “customer care numbers” you find by searching; a huge share are phishing.

A blunt caveat on the whole wind-down: the further an app sits from a regulated, Play-Store-listed operator, the weaker your recovery leverage and the higher the scam risk. A balance on Dream11 or MPL is far easier to recover than a balance on an unbranded Teen Patti clone. In both cases, your real protection is the payment rail, not the operator’s goodwill — which is exactly why the recovery method below routes through your bank and NPCI, not just the app.

The offshore trap: PROGA’s biggest danger to players

Here is the uncomfortable part of the PROGA story, and the most important safety warning on this page. When the legal, regulated operators shut down, the demand they served did not vanish — a large share of it migrated to illegal offshore betting sites, which are far more dangerous to play on than the licensed apps they replaced. If you take one practical lesson from this whole explainer, take this one.

The migration is documented and large. Per Storyboard18, usage of offshore betting platforms rose from 68.3% before the ban to 82% after it, and roughly one in four surveyed users said they started using offshore betting apps only after the ban came into effect. The illegal-betting brand 1xBet saw its India casino user base grow 53% from 2023 to 2025, partly fed by users displaced from the now-defunct domestic operators (Storyboard18).

The government is fighting back with the blocking power, but it is losing the whack-a-mole. MeitY has blocked over 7,800 gambling websites over the years and 242 in one recent batch, yet thousands keep operating. The reason is structural: a blocked offshore site simply launches a mirror domain within hours, with a near-identical name, and its business barely notices. One mirrored 1xBet domain logged around 228,000 monthly visits from India in late 2025; a mirrored Parimatch site saw nearly 300,000. Blocking a domestic app works; blocking a determined offshore operator with infinite mirror domains does not.

Why this is the real danger for you, in concrete terms:

• No Indian consumer protection applies. The RBI/NPCI rail rules, the ₹100/day failed-transaction compensation, the RBI Ombudsman — all of that exists because the legal operators used Indian, regulated payment rails. An offshore betting site routes your money through crypto, e-wallets, or grey payment channels that sit outside RBI’s reach. When an offshore site refuses to pay your winnings, there is no Indian authority to escalate to. Your leverage is zero.
• It is the operator’s crime, and the money path is murky. Depositing into an offshore money game still runs into PROGA’s prohibitions on the operator and facilitator side, and the payment channels are exactly the kind the financial-facilitation offence targets. You are funnelling money into an unlawful, unaccountable channel.
• Scams and clones are rampant. A huge share of “customer care numbers” and “withdrawal helpers” for these sites are pure phishing, designed to harvest your OTP or UPI PIN. The unregulated environment is a scammer’s paradise precisely because no one is policing it.

So the cruel irony of PROGA is that, for some users, banning the regulated product pushed them toward a far worse unregulated one. The correct response is not to chase the offshore replacements. It is to recover your stranded balance from the regulated operator using the rail-based method on this page, and then stop. If you find yourself searching for “best betting app that still works in India 2026,” understand that almost every result is an illegal offshore site with no protection for you whatsoever, and treat it accordingly.

The offshore warning in one line: when the legal apps closed, demand fled to illegal offshore sites where none of India’s payment-rail protections, ombudsman routes, or consumer rights apply — usage jumped from 68.3% to 82% post-ban. Recover your balance from the regulated operator, then walk away; do not follow the money into a channel where you have zero recourse.

The constitutional challenge: PROGA is not yet settled law

PROGA is on the books and being enforced, but its constitutional validity is being challenged in the Supreme Court, and that challenge is live as of mid-2026. You should treat the ban as the operative rule today while knowing the ground could shift.

The core constitutional fight: Centre versus State

The challenge rests on federalism. Under the Constitution, “betting and gambling” sits on the State List (Entry 34, List II) — historically a subject for state legislatures, not Parliament. Petitioners argue that by banning online money games centrally, PROGA intrudes on the states’ exclusive power over betting and gambling, and separately violates the fundamental right to carry on a business (Article 19(1)(g)) by wiping out a lawful industry overnight (Lexology / PSL Chambers). The government’s counter is that it is regulating online intermediaries and information technology — central subjects — rather than gambling premises, and that Section 18 of the Act gives it overriding effect over inconsistent state laws to the extent of the inconsistency.

Where the case stands

The Supreme Court was set to hear the batch of petitions — filed by operators including Head Digital Works, alongside a public-interest petition by activist K.A. Paul targeting platforms and celebrity endorsers — on 21 January 2026, before a three-judge bench led by Chief Justice Surya Kant (Storyboard18). The Court had earlier flagged the need for a larger bench given the constitutional weight, and consolidated related challenges. Until the Court rules, PROGA stands and is enforced — a pending challenge does not suspend a law unless the Court grants a stay.

What the challenge means for you, practically: nothing changes about your balance recovery. Whether or not the Supreme Court eventually narrows or strikes part of PROGA, your existing balance is recoverable now through the payment rail, and a new deposit is illegal now. Do not wait on the litigation to act on a stranded balance. And do not read “it’s being challenged in court” as “the ban isn’t real” — it is real and enforced today.

State law still matters at the edges

PROGA is central and claims overriding effect, but it did not erase the state layer entirely. Section 18 overrides state laws only to the extent they are inconsistent with PROGA. State rules that address things PROGA does not — offline gambling premises, age-gating of physical venues, consumer-protection measures, responsible-gaming codes — can survive (GaganLegal).

For context, the state picture before PROGA was uneven, and it shapes how enforcement and any future framework play out:

• Telangana and Andhra Pradesh had imposed blanket prohibitions on all staked games, including skill games — the strictest states, where operators often blocked users even when skill-gaming was legal elsewhere.
• Tamil Nadu banned online real-money games of chance and layered on player-protection rules such as time and spend limits.
• Haryana extended its gambling prohibition expressly to online mediums in 2025.
• Nagaland licensed online skill games, and Sikkim licensed casino and skill games within its own territory — the licensing outliers.
• Most other states relied on the skill-versus-chance distinction that PROGA has now centrally overridden for online money games.

The payout relevance: historically, a player in Telangana or Andhra Pradesh might have been refused onboarding or payout because staked play was banned in that state. Post-PROGA, the cash product is centrally prohibited everywhere, so the only thing that should still flow anywhere is a balance recovery. If an operator refuses to return your existing balance and cites your state, treat that as a payment-service deficiency and escalate it through the bank and consumer routes, not as a gaming dispute.

How PROGA changed the tax picture (and why your payout still shrinks)

A recurring confusion in 2026: players assume that because the game is banned, the tax rules vanished. They did not. Tax on winnings is set by the income-tax framework, which PROGA did not touch.

The operative rule is Section 194BA of the Income-tax Act: since 1 April 2023, every online-gaming operator must deduct TDS at 30% on net winnings, with no minimum threshold (the old ₹10,000 floor is gone). “Net winnings” is roughly what you came out ahead across the year, not every individual win. That regime still applies to a wind-down payout: when a discontinued operator returns your balance, it must still compute net winnings and deduct 30% before crediting you. So a recovery payout that lands 30% short of your on-screen winnings is TDS working as designed, reportable against your PAN and creditable when you file your return — not the operator cheating you.

The full mechanics — the net-winnings formula, worked examples for a net-winner and a net-loser, the year-end deduction edge case, and how the old 28% GST sat on deposits — are laid out in our dedicated TDS on online gaming explainer. The short version for PROGA purposes: the ban closed the deposit door and ended the GST question for you, but it left the 30% winnings TDS fully in place on the way out.

Recovering a stranded balance after PROGA: the practical method

This is the section most readers actually came for. You have a balance in a now-banned app and you want it out. PROGA does not block that recovery — operators kept withdrawals open and the payment rail is still RBI-regulated. Here is the method, in order. The deep, screen-by-screen version with copy-paste complaint templates is in our 3 Patti withdrawal guide; this is the PROGA-specific summary.

Step 1 — Get KYC clean and the account name matched

No legal payout clears to an un-verified or mismatched account. Make sure your PAN is verified and that the bank account or UPI ID you withdraw to is in your own name and matches your PAN exactly. A name mismatch — “RAHUL K” on the UPI handle versus “Rahul Kumar” on the PAN — is the single most common silent stall, and it does not get easier on a wind-down account where support is thinner.

Step 2 — Request the full withdrawable balance, expecting TDS

Read the withdrawable figure on the withdrawal screen, not the headline wallet number — deposit and bonus pots may not be withdrawable. Request the payout, and expect a 30% TDS cut on net winnings. The amount that arrives smaller than requested is almost always tax, not a problem.

Step 3 — Never deposit to “unlock” anything

A new deposit into a banned game is illegal and the rails are closed, so any prompt to “add ₹500 to release your ₹5,000” is a scam by definition. Legitimate recovery never requires a fresh deposit. The same goes for any “customer care number” that asks for your OTP or UPI PIN — real support never needs either.

Step 4 — If the payout stalls, escalate on the payment rail, not the dead game

This is where PROGA’s structure actually helps you. Your withdrawal travels over UPI or IMPS, operated by banks and aggregators regulated by the RBI. Once the payout is on the rail, it stops being a “gaming app problem” and becomes a payment-system problem with hard, RBI-mandated timelines:

• If the money was debited but not credited, RBI’s Turn Around Time circular forces an auto-reversal by T+1, with ₹100 per day compensation after that.
• File a UPI dispute through your app (it feeds NPCI’s dispute system) or lodge a failed-transaction complaint with your bank, quoting the UTR.
• After 30 days of no resolution from the regulated entity, escalate to the RBI Integrated Ombudsman Scheme — free of charge.

That rail-side leverage is the real reason a stranded balance is recoverable: you are not relying on a discontinued operator’s goodwill, you are using a regulated payment system with a complaints authority behind it. The full ladder — Day 0 evidence-freezing through Day 30 Ombudsman, with every template — is in the withdrawal guide.

One last practical note on timing and paperwork. Because the cash games closed in August 2025, a wind-down support desk in mid-2026 is a shrinking team handling a shrinking workload, so the cleaner and more complete your first request, the faster it clears. Send the withdrawal request with KYC already matched, keep dated screenshots of every screen, and capture the UTR the moment a payout reference appears — that 12-digit number is the single thread that lets a bank trace a missing credit. A request that arrives clean and fully documented on the first attempt almost always beats one that triggers a back-and-forth, and on a wind-down account every avoidable round-trip costs you days you may not get back.

The recovery summary in one breath: clean KYC → request the withdrawable balance → expect 30% TDS → never re-deposit → if it stalls on the rail, dispute through your bank/NPCI and claim ₹100/day past T+1. PROGA killed the game, not your claim on the money.

Eight PROGA myths, corrected

Misinformation spread fast after the ban, much of it from interested parties and from offshore sites trying to look legitimate. Here are the eight claims that mislead players most, each corrected against the sourced record above.

Myth 1 — “Rummy and fantasy sports are skill games, so PROGA doesn’t ban them.”

False. This is the single most common misunderstanding, and it is exactly backwards. PROGA bans online money games “irrespective of whether the game is based on skill, chance, or both.” The skill defence that protected rummy, poker and fantasy sports for two decades was deliberately removed by the Act. If the game takes your money and pays money back, the skill argument is legally irrelevant now. There are 0 legal real-money rummy or fantasy products in India post-PROGA.

Myth 2 — “I can be arrested for having played.”

False. PROGA’s criminal offences target operators, advertisers and money-movers. Law firms confirm that no criminal liability attaches to player participation itself. The three-year sentences in this Act land on the company that offered the game, not on the person who played it. Player-facing prison terms in the Act: zero.

Myth 3 — “The ban isn’t real because it’s stuck in the Supreme Court.”

False. A pending constitutional challenge does not suspend a law unless the Court grants a stay, and no such stay has lifted the ban. PROGA is enforced today — that is why the apps are gone. The hearing scheduled for 21 January 2026 could eventually narrow the Act, but until it does, the prohibition stands. Treating “it’s being challenged” as “it’s not in force” is how people get talked into illegal offshore sites.

Myth 4 — “The app stole my balance when it shut down.”

Almost always false. Operators kept withdrawals open during the wind-down and publicly confirmed wallet balances were safe. A balance that looks “stuck” is far more often a KYC mismatch, a TDS deduction, or a payment-rail delay than theft. Your balance is recoverable through the method on this page; it was the deposit door that closed, not the withdrawal door.

Myth 5 — “My payout was short, so I got cheated.”

Usually false. A recovery payout that arrives about 30% lighter than your on-screen winnings is almost always TDS under Section 194BA, deducted lawfully and creditable against your PAN. Disputing a legal TDS deduction wastes the days you would need for a genuine problem. Check the operator’s TDS statement first — the full math is in our TDS on online gaming page.

Myth 6 — “I should deposit a little to unlock my withdrawal.”

Dangerous and false. A new deposit into a banned game is illegal and the deposit rails are closed, so any prompt to “add money to release your balance” is a scam by definition. Legitimate recovery never requires a fresh deposit. This is the most expensive myth on the list, because acting on it hands money to a fraudster.

Myth 7 — “Offshore sites are a legal alternative now that the Indian apps are gone.”

False and the most harmful myth of all. Offshore betting sites are illegal, route money through channels outside RBI’s reach, and offer no Indian consumer protection — no ombudsman, no failed-transaction compensation, no recourse when they refuse to pay. Post-ban migration to these sites (from 68.3% to 82% of users) is PROGA’s worst side-effect, not a legitimate replacement.

Myth 8 — “All online games are banned now.”

False. PROGA bans only online money games. E-sports (skill tournaments with entry fees and prize money, no betting) and online social games (recreation or subscription games with no cash-out) remain fully legal and are actively encouraged. A free-to-play game, a subscription title, a competitive e-sports event — none of these were touched. Only the money-staking category was prohibited.

Where PROGA sits among the world’s gaming laws

PROGA is unusually blunt by international standards, and seeing it against other approaches clarifies just how far India went. Most large markets chose licensing — let real-money gaming exist, but tax and regulate it tightly. India chose prohibition of the money-gaming category outright. That is a minority position globally, and it shapes both the constitutional fight and the offshore-migration problem.

The United Kingdom runs the textbook licensing model: a single regulator, the Gambling Commission, licenses operators, enforces affordability and self-exclusion rules, and taxes the sector — gambling is legal but heavily policed. Many US states moved from prohibition toward state-by-state legalisation of online sports betting after 2018, treating it as a taxable, regulated activity rather than a banned one. Across the European Union, most members license and tax online gaming under national regulators. The dominant global pattern is “regulate and tax,” not “ban.”

India’s prohibition route is closer to jurisdictions that treat money gaming as a social harm to be removed rather than a vice to be managed. The trade-off is the one PROGA is now living: a clean prohibition is simple to state but hard to enforce against offshore operators, because you have banned the legal supply without removing the demand. Licensing regimes capture that demand inside a regulated, taxable perimeter; prohibition pushes it outward, toward exactly the illegal offshore sites this page warns about. Whether India’s bet — that the social benefit of removing money gaming outweighs the enforcement gap and the lost ₹20,000-crore-plus in annual tax — was the right call is, in the end, the same question the Supreme Court will weigh on the constitutional merits.

For a player, the international frame carries one useful lesson: in a licensing country, an “offshore” site is often just an unlicensed one you should still avoid; in post-PROGA India, every real-money site is now either a discontinued domestic operator (recover and leave) or an illegal offshore one (avoid entirely). There is no longer a legal, licensed, real-money option to migrate to. The legal lane that remains is e-sports and social games — no cash-out, no stake, no recovery problem.

The international placement, condensed: most major markets license and tax real-money gaming; India banned it. Prohibition is cleaner on paper but leaks demand offshore, which is why the UK-style licensed model keeps gambling inside a regulated perimeter while PROGA’s ban pushes it outside India’s reach. The legal real-money option in India is now 0 — only e-sports and social games remain.

What to watch next

PROGA is settled enough to govern your decisions today, but several threads are still moving. If you have a stake in the outcome — a stranded balance, a job in the sector, or just a stake in how the rules evolve — these are the developments worth tracking.

The Supreme Court ruling. The constitutional challenge heard from 21 January 2026 before Chief Justice Surya Kant’s three-judge bench is the biggest variable. If the Court upholds PROGA in full, the ban is locked in. If it strikes or narrows the Act on Entry-34 federalism grounds, the rules could shift — though even a favourable ruling for operators would take time to translate into reopened products. Nothing about that litigation changes your balance-recovery position now.

Authority determinations. As the Online Gaming Authority of India starts running its 90-day determination process under Rule 10, it will draw the contested lines the Act left fuzzy — particularly around gamification (loyalty wheels, convertible in-app tokens in non-gaming apps) and the exact boundary between a permitted social game and a banned money game. Each determination order is a precedent that sharpens where the line sits.

Offshore enforcement. MeitY’s blocking campaign against offshore betting sites — over 7,800 domains blocked and counting — is an ongoing fight it is currently losing to mirror domains. Watch whether the government pairs blocking with harder action on the payment side, since the financial-facilitation offence is its strongest lever against money reaching these sites.

The permitted-side build-out. The e-sports and social-gaming lane PROGA kept open is where surviving operators are pivoting. As the Authority recognises and registers e-sports under the National Sports Governance Act framework, the legitimate side of Indian gaming will take shape — a slower, quieter story than the ban, but the one that defines what legal Indian gaming looks like for the next decade.

What to watch, condensed: the Supreme Court ruling (could narrow PROGA), the Authority’s determination orders (will define the gamification edge), offshore enforcement (currently losing to mirror domains), and the e-sports/social-game build-out (the legal future). For your stranded balance, none of these change the play — recover it now through the payment rail.

Frequently asked questions

What is the PROGA Act 2025 in one sentence?

PROGA — the Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act, 2025 — is a central Indian law that bans all online money games (skill, chance, or both) while permitting e-sports and stake-free social games. It received Presidential assent on 22 August 2025.

When did PROGA come into force?

The Act received assent on 22 August 2025, but the operating Rules came into force on 1 May 2026 after MeitY notified them on 22 April 2026. The ban itself bit from August 2025, which is why the apps shut down then — roughly 8 months before the full Rules took effect.

Did PROGA pass quickly?

Yes — it went from Cabinet approval (19 August 2025) to Lok Sabha (20 August) to Rajya Sabha (21 August) to Presidential assent (22 August 2025), a span of just 4 days.

Is rummy banned under PROGA?

Yes. Real-money rummy is an online money game and is banned, because PROGA outlaws money games “irrespective of whether the game is based on skill, chance, or both” — ending the old skill defence. There are now 0 legal real-money rummy products in India. See our is rummy legal in India page.

Is fantasy sports like Dream11 banned?

Yes. Paying an entry fee to win a cash prize makes fantasy sports an online money game, so Dream11 and similar cash contests were banned and shut down in August 2025 — within 1 day of the Rajya Sabha vote.

What are the penalties for offering an online money game?

Offering a banned online money game carries imprisonment of up to 3 years, a fine of up to ₹1 crore, or both. A repeat conviction carries a mandatory minimum of 3 years and up to 5 years.

Can I, as a player, be jailed under PROGA?

No. PROGA’s offences target operators, advertisers and money-movers, not individual players. There are 0 player-facing prison terms in the Act’s offence provisions, and law firms confirm no criminal liability attaches to player participation itself.

What is the penalty for advertising a money game?

Advertising an online money game carries imprisonment of up to 2 years, a fine of up to ₹50 lakh, or both — which is why celebrity endorsements of these platforms are now legally exposed and are named in 1 public-interest petition before the Supreme Court.

Can banks be punished under PROGA?

Yes. Facilitating a financial transaction for a banned game carries imprisonment of up to 3 years, a fine of up to ₹1 crore, or both. This is the provision that closes the deposit rails by criminalising the payment plumbing — a single clause that does more enforcement work than chasing every operator.

Who regulates online gaming now — what is the OGAI?

The Online Gaming Authority of India (OGAI), an attached office of MeitY in Delhi, regulates the permitted categories and runs the determination test. It is a 6-member body chaired by the Additional Secretary, MeitY, with 5 Joint-Secretary-rank members from other ministries.

How long does the OGAI take to classify a game?

Under Rule 10, the Authority should complete a determination of whether a game is an online money game within 90 days (as far as practicable) of a complete application, pausing the clock for any applicant-caused delays.

Is PROGA being challenged in court?

Yes. Its constitutional validity is before the Supreme Court, with a hearing set for 21 January 2026 before a 3-judge bench led by Chief Justice Surya Kant. Petitioners argue it intrudes on the states’ Entry-34 power over betting and gambling. The ban remains enforced unless and until the Court stays or strikes it.

Can I still withdraw my balance from a banned app?

Yes. Operators kept withdrawals open during the wind-down even after disabling deposits, and major platforms publicly confirmed wallet balances were safe. Complete KYC, request the withdrawable amount to an own-name account, and expect a 30% TDS cut on net winnings.

Will my recovery payout be taxed?

Yes — 30% TDS on net winnings under Section 194BA, with no minimum threshold, still applies to a wind-down payout. So a recovery that arrives 30% lighter than your on-screen winnings is tax, reportable against your PAN, not theft. Details in our TDS on online gaming page.

What should I do if my stranded balance won’t pay out?

Work it as a payment-rail dispute, not a gaming complaint. If money was debited but not credited, RBI rules force an auto-reversal by T+1 with ₹100/day compensation after; after 30 days of no resolution you can escalate free to the RBI Ombudsman. The full ladder with templates is in our 3 Patti withdrawal guide.

Sources and further reading

This explainer is built on primary and authoritative secondary sources, listed in full in the page metadata. The load-bearing ones: the MeitY Act text and policy page, the PRS Legislative Research bill tracker, the PIB bill document and Rules press release, Drishti IAS and SCC Online on enforcement dates, GaganLegal and Lexology/PSL Chambers on the Rules and the constitutional challenge, Storyboard18 on the Supreme Court hearing, MediaNama and Mondaq on the operator wind-down, and the RBI Turn Around Time circular on payout recovery rights.

Reminder — this is information, not legal advice. It is a sourced, third-person reference written to help you understand PROGA and recover a stranded balance. It is not written by a lawyer and does not create any advisory relationship. For any decision that carries legal consequences for you, consult a qualified advocate.