Just four days ahead of the mega Indian Premier League player auction in Saudi Arabia, former Supreme Court judge, Justice Vikramjit Sen said bidding huge sums of money on cricketers was akin to ‘gambling’. Justice Sen was speaking during the launch of the book titled ‘Online Gaming in India – Technology, Policy and Challenges’ at the India International Centre on Tuesday evening. The book, published by the Taylor and Francis group, has been edited by Professors Lovely Dasgupta and Shameek Sen of West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences.
The IPL 2025 auction is set to be held on November 24 and 25 in Jeddah. It will only be the second time the auctions will take place outside India. The IPL auctions were held in Dubai in 2024.
The flourishing online gaming industry in confronted by several challenges. Apart from taxation issues, there are hardly any regulations that separate games of chance and games of skill. Many operators involved with popular games like cricket have taken advantage of this conundrum.
In his keynote address, Justice Sen took cricket as an example to explain the dilemma that has gripped people who engage in sporting activities that are legally vexed and terribly addictive.
“If you have seen any of these auctions of cricketers, what is there? It is just a gamble really. You don’t know how they (the players) are going to play at the end of it. It is just some information, some statistics which are given to you and you make these astronomical bids. If that is not gambling, what is it? That is permissible, but when you talk of some other activity, it is frowned upon,” said Justice Sen.
More than 200 slots will be up for grabs in the upcoming IPL auctions. Seventy overseas players can be bought during the auctions. Out of the 574 players who have been shortlisted for the auction, 81 have opted for the highest reserve price of Rs 2 crore each.
It is a well-known fact that several players who won the highest monies at the IPL auctions, seldom produced proportionate performances on the field. Yuvraj Singh, Chris Morris, Ben Stokes, Mitchell Starc are some glaring examples.
Tuesday’s book launch saw several legal luminaries speaking on the challenges confronting the Indian gaming industry, estimated to grow by 20% to reach INR 231 billion by 2025. Indian sports, especially cricket, is heavily entwined with the fantasy sports market with a user base of 180 million. There are over 550 million online gamers in India, the second largest in the world.
The government has so far failed to frame clear-cut regulations to separate games of skill and games of chance. In a rather immature but aggressive market, where private operators constitute their own business policies to beat the existing laws and the taxation framework, making regulations has been a major hurdle.
Vikramjit Banerjee, the Additional Solicitor General of India, said: “India is like the Wild West … like the Chambal… it’s like anything goes and there are no regulations. One of the most important things that we (the government) are facing today is how to regulate the (sports and entertainment) industry on the internet and we are increasingly coming into conflict because corporate interests want the least amount of regulations.”
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