Esports As A Profession: Why India’s Prog Act 2025 Recognised Competitive Gaming Without Building The Legal Infrastructure To Support It
- IJLLR Journal
- 10 hours ago
- 1 min read
Kabir Gaba, Symbiosis Law School, Pune
ABSTRACT
The Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act, 2025 (“PROG Act”) and the Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Rules, 2026 (“2026 Rules”) accomplished something that two decades of fragmented state gambling legislation, private member bills, and informal industry self- governance had not: they conferred statutory recognition on esports as a legitimate competitive sport and cleanly severed it from “online money gaming,” which the Act prohibits. This article accepts that achievement on its own terms. Its argument is narrower and, it is submitted, more urgent: recognition is not infrastructure. The legislative architecture tells esports practitioners what they are — a recognised sport — without resolving the three questions that determine whether a person can actually build a livelihood from that recognition: whether a professional player is an employee or an independent contractor; who owns the intellectual property a player generates; and how a player’s earnings are taxed and banked. None of these is answered by the new framework, and at least one — the financial- treatment question — has been made materially worse by the 2026 Rules’ registration-verification regime. The article maps each gap against existing Indian statutes, contrasts the position with the French and Korean models, and argues that all three deficiencies can be cured without new primary legislation: a clarification under the labour codes, a clarification of first ownership and performer’s rights under the Copyright Act, and a coordinated CBDT–RBI circular on the financial treatment of esports income. Recognition created the category; these three interventions would give the category content.
