In April, we traded the heat for a few days in Mussoorie at our firm-wide retreat. Cooler weather, better views, and (briefly) a slower pace.

But in India, tech policy was unpredictable and intense. Along with an institutional home for India’s AI governance, and online gaming finally receiving a rulebook, the IT ministry also rolled out another amendment to the IT Rules.

At the same time, five states went to polls, triggering real-time content enforcement at scale, with over 11,000 social media posts taken down. Courts, meanwhile, are grappling with questions around blocked news channels, parallel censorship mechanisms, and the growing use of influencer injunctions

Here’s everything that went down, and why we are praying for a slower May.

Image credits: created by Pravi

I. Deep dive

India finally has an online gaming rulebook. Here's what it actually means.

India's online gaming industry has had a turbulent year or so. At its peak, it was around ₹31,000 crore business — fantasy cricket apps, rummy platforms, poker rooms, all operating in a grey zone where courts kept ruling that skill-based games were constitutionally protected. Then Parliament passed the Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act in August 2025 and flipped the table entirely.

Real-money gaming was banned. Dream11, once valued at $8 billion, shut its money-game operations. MPL, WinZO, Zupee, PokerBaazi — all followed in pivoting away their operations. Thousands of jobs were lost. The government's reasoning was premised on the detrimental social impact: and an estimated ₹20,000 crore drained from ordinary people annually and loss of lives due to these games.

With the Act in place, it also needed a rulebook (you can read our detailed analysis of the act here). A draft of the rules had come out on 1 October 2025, but finally on April 22, the Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology (MeitY) notified the Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Rules, 2026 — 26 rules, 6 parts, and a May 1st start date. Here's what they do.

Here’s a quick refresher on the type of games being regulated:

Category	What it is	Legal status
Online Money Games	Pay money, expect to win money.	BANNED. Criminal offence from May 1 — imprisonment and fines.
Online Social Games	No monetary stakes — puzzles, RPGs, learning tools etc.	Free to operate. Registration only if government notifies the category or determination happens suo motu by OGAI.
E-Sports	Competitive, skill-based formats — Think BGMI tournaments, Valorant leagues, chess. Must also satisfy NSGA 2025 recognition.	Mandatory OGAI registration. Recognition under NSGA pre-requisite to registration.

What do the rules say?

The authority: OGAI

The body overseeing all of this is the newly constituted Online Gaming Authority of India (OGAI). It is an attached office of MeitY. Additional Secretary, MeitY will be ex officio chairperson with 5 members, including Joint Secretaries of Ministry of Home Affairs, Department of Financial Services, Ministry of Information & Broadcasting, Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports (MYAS), and Department of Legal Affairs. A Secretary of the Authority can be appointed but must not be below the rank of Director in the Central Government

The OGAI determines whether a game qualifies as an online money game using a five-factor test, registers e-sports, handles complaints, and imposes penalties. The five factors are: (i) fee/deposit requirement, (ii) expectation of monetary return, (iii) function of fee, (iv) manner of rewards and use outside the game, and (v) revenue model.

It has 90 days to process each determination. Registration certificates last up to ten years.

How does it affect people in the gaming ecosystem?

A. Impact on games

If you are an entity operating an online money game platform after May 1, you are not in a grey zone — you are committing a criminal offence. Banks must freeze your transactions, or they could face criminal liability. State cyber cell officers are authorised to investigate offences. You can face penal consequences of up to 3 years of imprisonment and/or a fine of up to INR 1 crore.
For online social games, it might be important to look at the business model and ensure that it is distinct from an online money game or an e-sport since the registration mechanism is different. Companies can expect scrutiny from OGAI, banks and financial institutions on their gaming and revenue mechanics, so might be useful to document exactly how the game is distinct from an online money game.

B. Impact on e-sports:

The industry’s reaction has been broadly positive, with the expectation of future regulatory clarity. One key issue to fix is the ‘recognition’ procedure by MYAS under the NSGA. As of now, that pathway is unclear, with MYAS yet to issue any directions on how this will happen under the new NSGA framework.
Questions remain: Who is going to form the national federation for e-sports? Will an esport tournament organizer apply for registration/recognition? Or will the game title be expected to do that? What happens to all the e-sports competitions already lined up in the next few months? Will they all be illegal till the registration takes place? (Note: the entire process could take up to 3 months). The OGAI will look to address these issues at the earliest or risk collapsing India’s established e-sports ecosystem under the weight of ‘recognition’.

C. Impact on financial entities:

The Act bans not just operating an online money game but advertising an online money game and facilitating financial transactions for one.
Banks and other similarly placed financial entities like payment gateways will play the role of a gatekeeper. They are a financial checkpoint for gaming providers. Banks cannot facilitate transactions for clients who are operating online money games from May 1. Facilitation is a criminal offence. This will attract a penalty of 3 years’ imprisonment or fines up to INR 1 crore or both.
Before processing transactions for online social games or e-sports, they must verify a gaming platform’s certificate of registration (as per the directions of the government). They may now build protocols that will assess whether a gaming company’s offering is within the online money game definition or not.

D. Impact on the advertising ecosystem:

Across the ad supply chain, if you are an influencer, celebrity, ad agency – who is promoting online money games – then you will be held liable and face criminal penalties.
So now, entities within the ecosystem must verify an online gaming company’s product closely and undertake their own due diligence to ensure that they are not facilitating or advertising an online money game in any way.

E. Impact on gamers

Formal recognition gives e-sports a legal foundation that didn't exist earlier. It will be important for the industry to build on this regulatory architecture. Expect the gradual emergence of structured team entities tied to specific titles or leagues, infrastructure being built specifically for e-sports gaming, and potentially professional bodies that can help govern the ecosystem.

What to watch next

The Supreme Court challenge is the one that could affect the online gaming law. Fantasy sports platforms such as Head Digital Works — validated by lower courts as skill-based games — are arguing that a blanket ban violates Article 19(1)(g), the right to practise any trade or profession.
The guidance on the recognition process for e-sports under NSGA 2025.
OGAI’s work as a regulatory authority, how it handles the first batch of applications and any future notifications.

II. Connecting the dots

IT Rules: pushback, extensions, and another amendment

The draft Second Amendment Rules to the IT Rules — proposing to make MeitY advisories binding and extend the Inter-Departmental Committee's reach to ordinary users sharing news — drew swift criticism. Civil society and international bodies weighed in: Human Rights Watch called the proposals an expansion of censorship, Amnesty urged their withdrawal, and press bodies flagged serious free speech concerns.

Responding to objections about both the 15-day window and the substance of the draft, MeitY extended the deadline to April 29. It then proposed further changes — specifically to the SGI labelling provisions, requiring AI-generated content labels to remain continuously visible throughout a piece of content, not merely at one point.

The trigger was unsatisfactory compliance with the February rules: platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and X had been displaying labels inconsistently, with MeitY sharing specific examples of non-compliant videos directly with platforms.

The deadline has since been extended again to May 7. Digital rights group IFF flagged the resulting "consultation fatigue" — pointing out that layering new amendments into an active consultation makes it structurally difficult for stakeholders to offer considered responses. Some have raised concerns about the feasibility of continuous labelling, and the potential increase in costs to maintain the system. Stakeholders now need to send comments on an updated set of draft Second Amendment Rules.

Content moderation meets elections

The 2026 assembly elections across Assam, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Puducherry, and West Bengal have produced another test for digital content enforcement during polls. Since the election schedule was announced on March 15, the Election Commission and state IT nodal officers acted on over 11,000 social media posts — through removals, FIRs, clarifications, and rebuttals. Platforms were directed to take down unlawful or AI-generated content within three hours of being notified, and all synthetic campaign material was required to be clearly labelled. The ECI's C-Vigil complaint platform received over 3 lakh complaints, with 96% resolved within 100 minutes.

The timing is not incidental. The SGI labelling rules, notified in February 2026 and operative from February 20, came into force with an election season already on the horizon. The explicit mentioning of elections in the FAQs, and the present enforcement numbers suggest they were designed with this kind of moment in mind. Elections are fast becoming an important digital space for India's content moderation infrastructure.

India's AI governance gets its institutional home

India has been building an AI governance architecture piece by piece. This month, the institutional layer came into view. On April 16, MeitY constituted the AI Governance and Economic Group (AIGEG), a high-level inter-ministerial body chaired by IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw, to serve as the apex coordinating authority for India's national AI governance strategy. Two days later, MeitY constituted the Technology and Policy Expert Committee (TPEC), a standing expert body chaired by the MeitY Secretary, tasked with feeding technical and policy expertise into the AIGEG's decision-making. Together, these two bodies formalise the governance structure envisioned in India's AI Governance Guidelines. It’ll be worth looking out for the regulatory output from these bodies – and how they shape the AI ecosystem in the country.

States, Parliament, and an expanding regulatory perimeter for social media bans

Across India, the push to regulate children's relationship with social media is gaining legislative shape, and moving faster than it was even a month ago. Andhra Pradesh is drafting legislation to restrict under-13 access and exploring age-verification through DigiLocker. Karnataka's draft Digital Safety Bill, meanwhile, takes a wider lens — covering deepfakes, misinformation, and AI-generated content broadly, while also proposing a mandatory digital literacy programme in schools and colleges, reflecting a growing recognition that regulation alone cannot substitute for awareness among younger users.

In Parliament, the demand for an under-16 social media ban came from both ruling coalition and opposition benches, with one MP comparing platforms to tobacco in terms of harm to children. The education minister acknowledged enforcement challenges — a signal the government is still working through the how, while the political support is converging together. What's emerging is less a coherent national framework and more a patchwork of state-level experiments, each with different definitions, different enforcement mechanisms, and different thresholds.

III. From the courtroom to your inbox

When national security meets a platform’s revenue models: The Central Government defended its blocking of 4PM, a digital news channel with 8.4 million subscribers—by arguing that YouTube's ad-revenue model creates financial incentives for "outrage-driven content" that foreign actors can weaponize. In an affidavit before the Delhi High Court, the government claimed Section 69A of the IT Act permits blocking entire channels, not just individual videos, when national security is at stake. 4PM and its editor-in-chief challenged the block, noting they received no formal order or reasons from the IT Ministry. The blocked videos remain accessible only outside India. The case tests whether blocking powers extend to entire channels, and whether due process can be bypassed through national security invocations.

Blocked without explanation: Molitics, a popular digital news platform, had its Facebook page blocked across India, allegedly without notice, reasons, or a chance to respond. The Delhi High Court issued notices to the Central Government and Meta, asking which legal provision authorized the block. Days later, Molitics' Instagram account was suspended for "too much activity that violates community standards." The court wants the blocking mechanism clearly explained and sought a reply. As of 23 April, Molitics has requested to withdraw the petition considering certain information received by the concerned intermediary – the court has subsequently disposed of such petition, with “all rights and contentions left open”.

Motorola's defamation injunction against tech influencers: A Bengaluru civil court restrained multiple technology content creators from posting content alleging that Motorola phones are unsafe or prone to exploding. The temporary injunction also called for existing material to be taken down, de-indexed, and made non-searchable across platforms and search engines. Motorola filed the case following viral social media posts making such allegations. While defamation law protects corporate reputation, the breadth of the order—covering multiple influencers and requiring platform-wide content removal raises questions about its chilling effect on product criticism and consumer advocacy. The matter is now listed for 2 June, 2026.

Gujarat High Court directs platforms to join Sahyog Portal: The Gujarat High Court issued notices to Meta, Google, X, Reddit, and Scribd in a public interest petition citing an alarming rise in deepfake and AI-generated content. The court directed all named platforms to onboard the Sahyog portal (the government's centralized mechanism) for taking down unlawful online content. The court noted that while some intermediaries like Google and Meta have been efficient in responding to takedown requests, others like X have made insufficient efforts. The next hearing is on 8 May, 2026 – where the court is looking to hear MeitY’s arguments, along with views from the identified intermediaries.

Bombay High Court examines whether Sahyog portal creates parallel censorship

The Bombay High Court heard comedian Kunal Kamra's challenge to the Sahyog portal, arguing it creates an unconstitutional parallel censorship regime outside the procedural safeguards provided under the IT Act. During the hearing, the petition highlighted how "an average policeman can direct content removal based on what he personally finds unsuitable" - exposing potential misuse and lack of oversight. With new draft IT Rules amendments now public, the court granted time for the petitioner to amend their plea and directed the Central Government to file its reply. The case questions whether a centralized takedown mechanism can operate without meaningful checks on executive discretion.

IV. Reading reccos

Sevanti Ninan presents the argument that recent policy moves are steadily expanding the government’s censorship powers, raising concerns about shrinking space for free speech and dissent.
Taylor Lorenz has a piece analyzing Substack to show how much of it is AI generated.
The New Yorker explores how Chinese micro-dramas have become so popular.