Online Gaming Act's rules to come into effect from Oct 1: Minister
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New Delhi: Ashwini Vaishnaw, the Union Minister, announced Thursday that the Promotion and Regulation of Online Games Act, 2025, will go into effect on October 1.
After the bill was passed by the Parliament, the government resumed talks with stakeholders, such as banks, gaming companies, and other organisations, the minister said.
Vaishnaw said that the government had been in talks with industry stakeholders for almost three years. He emphasised that the government is willing to give additional time if the industry requests it and mentioned that a final round of consultations will take place before implementation starts.
"For almost everything we do, our government believes in a highly consultative process," he stated.
The act, which was notified on August 22, outlaws online real-money games in India, whether they are categorised as skill or chance games.
It is now illegal to offer or take part in such games, and there is no bail.
A major change from previous regulations, which were primarily influenced by state laws and court rulings that distinguished skill-based games from gambling, the legislation was introduced in the Lok Sabha on August 20 and passed in two days.
Earlier on Thursday, the Minister, at a pre-event of the AI Impact Summit 2026, announced that the government will establish over 500 data labs nationwide as part of the 'India AI Mission' to increase artificial intelligence (AI) talent and infrastructure.
He said the initiative is part of the larger IndiaAI mission, and eight new companies, including Tech Mahindra, Fractal Analytics and IIT Bombay consortium Bharatgen, have been selected to build large language models (LLMs).
Under the IndiaAI mission, the government has allocated Rs 988.6 crore to an IIT Bombay-led consortium to build a 1 trillion parameter LLM. In LLMs that extract linguistic relations and patterns from training data, internal variables are called parameters.
The IndiaAI Mission is the Centre’s initiative to develop autonomous AI capabilities through sector-specific AI applications, sovereign LLMs, GPUs and capacity projects. 10,300 crore was approved earlier this year.