Middle Class Values Clash With Venture-Funded Dreams

Last year, as I was driving through South Delhi on my way to the airport, I noticed randomly stuck posters with images of BJP leader Vijay Goel and a bilingual slogan that simply said ‘Ban Online Gaming’.

Goel has held several positions, including as a minister of youth affairs & sports in previous BJP-led governments and is fairly active in Delhi on city issues; most recently on stray dogs.

The posters struck me as somewhat unusual.

Not so much because of the issue they raised, but he was calling out his own government. An act not easily forgiven in India’s centralised political party systems.

Yet, by all accounts, he laboured on.

Don’t Tell Mamma, ‘Cause Mamma Don’t Know

Last November, after he launched the poster campaign and staged a protest at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar, he wrote a letter to Ashwini Vaishnaw, Minister for Electronics and Information Technology, pleading for online gaming to be banned.

Goel argued that many youngsters were taking loans for these games, and the repeated losses were leading them into debt traps. In extreme cases, they even led to suicide. Parents were mostly unaware that their children were engaging in gambling, not gaming, he said, hitting out at film actors and cricketers who promoted these apps.

Swift And In A ‘Stealth Mode’

Did Goel’s untiring efforts lead to the dramatic passing of the Promotion & Regulation of Online Gaming Bill 2025, which criminalises the online gaming industry in one shot?

Possible, but typically in such political actions, there could be several other factors known and unknown, which led to the final stroke or bill.

Incidentally, thirty years ago, Goel won another similar battle, this time against ‘single digit’ lotteries, which formed a bulk of lotteries at the time, as part of a broader campaign.

What is quite clear, as I discovered over the weekend, was that the coming of the bill was not known to most — including some of the highest echelons of India’s banking system who now stand to be penalised if such transactions were allowed.

The bill was a surprise — for the stealth with which it was introduced and the speed with which it was passed, including the President of India’s assent after the lower and upper houses cleared it. All in around 48 hours.

What triggered the move to bring down the Rs 20,000 crore per annum industry, which also creates thousands of jobs, and swells the tax kitty?

As per the Government’s own statement, the legislation is designed to curb addiction, financial ruin and social distress caused by predatory gaming platforms that thrive on misleading promises of quick wealth.

It also points to a money laundering angle. It is however careful to distinguish real money gaming from other forms of gaming like E-sports and what it calls social gaming — both of which it wants to promote and encourage.

The question that comes up is —- why did the government move on this and so suddenly? The arguments for allowing real money gaming have been known - the industry remains legitimate under the government’s watch. It also prevents money from moving offshore via betting platforms — mostly for cricket — via cryptocurrencies, for example.

The government’s view, stated or otherwise, is that it knows that and has taken a social and perhaps moral call.

I would call it a middle class values-based decision.

Swiping Away Savings

Goel could have had a personal reason for sticking to the issue of gambling, as he has seen it for decades; and even went solo on his protests.

I would argue that most middle class parents in India would think the same as Goel. No one would like their children to swipe away their family savings on slick betting apps, quite literally on the dinner tables.

Instead of building their lives and careers.

Like all techno-social booms, gambling apps have crept up and become larger than life before we knew it.

Unlisted Dream11 was valued at Rs 67,860 crore as per the 2025 Burgundy Private Hurun India 500 list whose value went up 13% year on year due to increasing engagement. When something is as big and ubiquitous as a jersey sponsor for the Indian cricket team, the greater the acquired legitimacy of the brands, in this case Dreams11.

The lack of clear regulation in this sector also led to billions of dollars of venture capital money flow into the sector.

Should venture capitalists have thought twice before investing in an area with opaque regulation? Actually, that is precisely the area they would invest in, hoping size and brazen advertising would force regulation in their favour.

But unlike ride hailing apps like Uber or Ola, which also test most countries’ regulatory frameworks, there is no middle class value question at hand.

In this case there is.

The government has evidently taken a call that values are under threat here. The term middle class, by the way is mine, and used for its social and not economic import, though it could mean both.

More importantly, this is also a lesson for businesses and ventures in general, which are set up in a manner that could militate against India’s middle class values.

In changing times, no response is immediate because a values ecosystem takes time to process the true impact of something, first financial and then social.

With hundreds of thousands of crores lost in derivatives trading and real money gaming by mostly young Indian youth, a snapping point was bound to come.