‘The family paid the price’: India’s deadly online gambling crisis

In a rural village in Telangana, a young man’s descent into online betting ended with the deaths of him and his parents, illustrating how rapidly accumulating losses and mounting pressure can devastate families. Police said the 22-year-old, Harish, started wagering during the COVID-19 pandemic, spent roughly 1.8 million rupees and borrowed from more than a dozen people; his parents sold land and took on extra work to try to cover debts before the family died by suicide on October 3, 2024.

Such tragedies are occurring as India’s money-based gaming market expands. Industry figures cited about 591 million gamers in 2024 and revenue of roughly $3.7 billion that year, with money-driven play accounting for about 86 percent of income and forecasts projecting growth to $9.1 billion by 2029. Lawmakers moved in 2025 to ban all online gaming involving money, but authorities and researchers say betting has continued through apps, cross-border platforms and a clandestine payments ecosystem.

Investigations and public-policy analyses depict a large, hard-to-track illegal market. A 2025 CUTS International report estimated the 15 biggest unauthorised betting platforms drew more than 5.4 billion visits from India in the 2024–25 financial year and suggested annual deposits on illegal sites could be about $100 billion. Prosecutors told a different slice of the story: documents from the Enforcement Directorate say one app, Mahadev Online, generated roughly 430 billion rupees over seven years. Analysts and officials describe use of phone banking, mule accounts and mobile apps to move funds around regulatory barriers.

Clinicians and police caution that suicide is multifactorial, yet case reports show how financial losses, shame and social pressure often converge. Other reported incidents include a 20-year-old engineering student in Hyderabad who died by suicide in February 2024 after borrowing about 300,000 rupees, and a 27-year-old trader who accumulated hundreds of thousands of rupees in losses before his death. A 2026 meta-analysis of 14 observational studies found significant associations between gambling disorder and suicidal thoughts, attempts and mortality, underscoring the public-health dimension of the problem.

Families and investigators say the shift from street bookmakers to smartphone-based play has made betting more pervasive and harder to detect. Fantasy sports, prediction games and in-app ads that appear alongside live matches are common entry points that frame play as skill or competition. As policymakers, enforcement agencies and communities grapple with both legal and illicit channels, the cases from Telangana raise questions about how to protect vulnerable users and hold opaque operators to account.