spot_img
spot_imgspot_imgspot_imgspot_img

Centre informs Delhi High Court it is in process of finalising online gaming regulations

Published on:

The Centre informed the Delhi High Court on Monday that the draft online gaming regulations were circulated and are now being finalized. The statement was made by the central government’s counsel in front of a bench consisting of Chief Justice Satish Chandra and Justice Subramonium Prasad.

The court, which was hearing petitions by Atul Batra and Avinash Mehrotra regarding the regulation of online gaming, was informed about the consultations that have been done with the stakeholders.

“Draft regulation has been circulated and consultations have started. Stakeholder meeting with all representatives, whether lawyers or civil society… two rounds have already happened. We are in the process of finalizing the same,” the lawyer said as per a PTI release.

The court said that it will revisit the matter eight weeks from now in light of the Centre’s statement. After Batra stated that no further order was necessary regarding his plea on online gaming regulations, the court ended consideration of his petition. However, it allowed Batra the freedom to approach it in case of any grievance.

Batra, in his plea, stated that online games of chance are being marketed as games of skill. He mentioned further that these games are just as harmful as substance addiction.

Furthermore, it was argued that if online gambling and betting are not controlled, they might have a significant negative impact on society as a whole since impressionable young people may become addicted to these games, which could negatively affect their personal and professional lives.

According to Mehrotra’s petition, he claimed that India’s online gaming industry is unregulated and “a great place for carrying out hawala operations” and “laundering money”.

In addition to calling for a ban on these websites, he also wanted tax recovery from users and operators of these platforms and asked the Centre to “prosecute the unscrupulous owners/proprietors, and the promoters of the online gambling websites, in accordance with law.”

The draft rules for online gaming were proposed by The Ministry for Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) in January and as part of it MeitY proposed setting up of self-regulatory organizations (SROs).

Rajeev Chandrasekhar, Minister of State for Electronics and IT, stated that SROs would create the filters and tests necessary to determine what constitutes lawful gaming, whether a game is chance-based or skills-based or anything else.

Related