India's Gaming Authority Has Registered No Games Since May, the Ministry Says

Five months after India's online gaming law took effect, the regulator it created had granted no registrations by 1 September and had received 201 complaints, the IT ministry told the country's information commission.

• The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) told the Central Information Commission that "no online game has been granted registration" by the Online Gaming Authority of India (OGAI), and that 201 complaints had been received by 1 September 2026
• The figures came out in a right-to-information case and were first reported on 18 September
• The Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act, 2025 and its rules took effect on 1 May 2026; the OGAI was constituted by gazette notification on 22 April
• The Act bans online money games, with prison terms of up to three years and fines of up to ₹1 crore for offering them, and gives the OGAI the job of registering e-sports and online social games
• In March the authority's website showed registry entries that appeared to be test data, MediaNama reported

A Registry With Nothing in It

India's Online Gaming Authority had not registered a single game by 1 September, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology said in submissions to the Central Information Commission (CIC). "No online game has been granted registration under the Online Gaming Authority of India (OGAI), while 201 complaints had been received as on September 1, 2026," the ministry said, according to the Press Trust of India report carried by Business Standard on 18 September.

The figures emerged from an application under the Right to Information Act asking which online games were permitted to operate, how many complaints had been received and what action had been taken against fake games. The applicant challenged the ministry's first reply as incomplete; the first appellate authority upheld it, and the case went to the CIC. Information Commissioner P R Ramesh observed that the RTI Act entitles an applicant to information held on record and does not require an officer to create information or draw inferences, and the Commission concluded that the available information had been provided. The ministry did not say what the 201 complaints concerned or what action followed.

The ministry told the Commission that the Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act, 2025 was notified on 22 August 2025 and the Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Rules, 2026 on 22 April 2026, when the OGAI was constituted under Section 8 of the Act. Both took effect on 1 May. The Act prohibits online money games: Section 5 provides for up to three years' imprisonment and fines of up to ₹1 crore (approximately $114,000) for offering or facilitating them, with higher penalties for repeat offences, while Sections 6 and 7 cover advertising and payments, according to Casino News Daily. The OGAI's role is to classify games as money games, social games or e-sports, keep a national registry and handle grievances.

The empty registry is not the first sign of a slow start. When the authority's website went live in March, before the rules were notified, MediaNama found it partly under construction, with a homepage claiming 49 applications and 22 approvals while the registry itself showed entries labelled "test" and certificates that returned errors.

The Money-Game Ban Is Enforced; the Rest of the Law Is Not Yet Working

The Act had two jobs: to shut down real-money gaming, which led operators such as Probo to halt real-money play in August 2025, and to promote e-sports and social games through a registration regime. The first has been carried out through the ban itself and the criminal penalties attached to it. The second depends on the OGAI, and five months after the rules took effect it has not registered a game. For publishers of social games and e-sports titles, registration is meant to be the proof that a product is not a money game; without it, they operate under a law whose protective half does not yet function.

201 Complaints and No Published Action Is a Transparency Problem

A regulator that has received 201 complaints and registered nothing has, on the ministry's own figures, done most of its visible work on the enforcement side. The CIC's reasoning, that the ministry need not create information it does not hold, means the public still does not know what the complaints were about, whether any led to blocking or prosecution, or how many registration applications are pending. For an authority created to bring order to a market that was banned within days of the bill's introduction, the absence of published data is itself the finding.

India built a regulator for the games it chose to allow. So far, it has registered none of them.