India has always looked irresistible on a spreadsheet: 1.4 billion people, obsessive cricket fandom, cheap data and frictionless payments. For gambling executives, however, the spreadsheet needs a second tab labelled “things that can become illegal before lunch.”

A market built on exceptions

For more than a century, India’s gambling regime was less a market than a mosaic. The Public Gambling Act of 1867 supplied the colonial template, while the Constitution left “betting and gambling” to the states. Courts then carved out an economically important distinction between games of chance and games in which skill predominates. That opened room for rummy, poker and fantasy-sports businesses, even as most conventional betting remained prohibited.