India's Online Gambling Crisis Claims Lives as Platforms Evade Ban

In a village in Telangana's Nizamabad district, a 22-year-old named Harish began placing small bets online during the pandemic. What started as casual wagering became something else entirely—a spiral of losses, borrowed money, and mounting pressure that eventually claimed three lives.

Harish accumulated roughly 1.8 million rupees, more than $21,000, through online betting. He borrowed from at least a dozen people in his village. His parents, a farmer and his wife who ran a small grocery shop together, tried to intervene. They sold a plot of land to cover some of the debt. When that proved insufficient, Harish and his mother took work with a caterer to raise more money. The pressure did not ease. On October 3, 2024, Harish, his father Ranganaveni Suresh, and his mother Hemalatha died by suicide at their home. A cousin later reflected on the shock of discovery: creditors began arriving at the house only after the deaths, revealing the full scope of obligations the family had been concealing.

Harish's story is not isolated. India's online gambling market has grown into a sprawling, difficult-to-regulate industry. The country had approximately 591 million gamers in 2024. The legal online gaming sector generated $3.7 billion that year, with money-based games accounting for 86 percent of all revenue. Projections suggested the market would more than double to $9.1 billion by 2029. Behind the licensed operators exists a far larger shadow economy. A 2025 report by the policy organization CUTS International documented that the fifteen largest unauthorized betting platforms received more than 5.4 billion visits from India during the 2024-25 financial year. Illegal gambling platforms processed an estimated $100 billion in annual deposits, moving money through phone banking, mule accounts, and mobile applications.

The mechanics of online betting have made addiction particularly insidious. A person no longer needs a bookmaker or a physical location. Betting happens on a smartphone, often while watching a cricket match, with advertisements for winnings displayed on the same screen. The entry point is frequently disguised as something other than gambling—a fantasy sports game, a prediction contest framed around knowledge and skill rather than chance. A loss of a few hundred rupees becomes a wager to recover it. That wager becomes a loan. The loan becomes a debt that spreads beyond the person who placed the original bet. Manoj Kumar Sharma, a clinical psychology professor at India's National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences, described the psychological trap: wins produce a strong sense of reward, while losses create guilt and regret alongside the belief that money can still be recovered. That expectation keeps people gambling even as losses mount, creating a cycle increasingly difficult to break.

Other families have experienced similar tragedies. In Hyderabad, a 20-year-old aeronautical engineering student named Selam Manoj died by suicide in February 2024 after becoming addicted to online games and betting. His father told police that Manoj had borrowed 300,000 rupees, roughly $3,600, from friends. The family repaid the debt, but Manoj died by suicide anyway. In another case, a 27-year-old cattle-feed trader named Balagoni Pavan Kumar accumulated hundreds of thousands of rupees in betting losses. His father had previously cleared his debts and warned him to stop, but the betting continued. Pavan Kumar later died by suicide. His sister Kalpana said afterward: the betting did not affect only him. The whole family paid the price. They lost their peace, their savings, and the future they had planned.

Experts and police officials acknowledge that suicide is complex and cannot be attributed to gambling alone. However, a 2026 meta-analysis of fourteen observational studies found significant associations between gambling disorder and suicidal ideation, suicide attempts, and suicide mortality, though the strength of those associations varied across studies and regions. What is clear is how financial losses, addiction, shame, and family pressure can collide.

In 2025, the Indian Parliament passed the Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act, prohibiting all online money games—whether based on chance, skill, or a combination of the two. The law also prohibited their advertising, promotion, and facilitation. Banks and payment systems were barred from processing transactions connected to prohibited money games. The law came into force on May 1, 2026. Yet tougher laws have not eliminated the appetite for betting. Websites disappear and return under new domain names. Social media accounts are removed and replaced. Users are redirected into private messaging groups. Affiliate networks promote betting services without appearing to operate the platforms themselves. In June 2026, India's Ministry of Information and Broadcasting warned celebrities and influencers against endorsing offshore betting platforms. An advertising standards council identified 7,927 offshore betting advertisements in 2025 alone, accounting for 72 percent of all violations found in its monitoring. The council also identified 854 influencers involved in offshore betting promotions between April and December 2025.

Celebrity endorsements have made online money gaming feel ordinary to millions of Indians. Cricketers, actors, and social media personalities have appeared in advertisements for gaming and fantasy-sports brands, lending legitimacy to products that might otherwise seem unfamiliar or risky. In 2025, former Indian cricketer Suresh Raina was questioned by the Enforcement Directorate as part of an investigation into illegal betting-app promotions. For the companies and networks profiting from betting, India's 1.4 billion people represent an enormous digital market. For families like Harish's, online betting meant something entirely different: a story that began with a young man trying to make money through his phone and ended with three deaths.