One Act, Many Outcomes
One 1867 Act, very different outcomes — compare how any two Indian states regulate gambling today.
India's gambling law did not start from six different places. It started from one: the Public Gambling Act, 1867, a single colonial-era statute. What happened after that act is the interesting part. Some states kept it almost unchanged. Others carved out exceptions, wrote entirely new statutes, or reinterpreted "game of skill" in ways that diverge sharply from their neighbours. This site is a reference tool for tracing that divergence, state by state, criterion by criterion.
Why a comparator, not a ranking
Gambling regulation in India is a matter largely reserved to the states under the constitutional distribution of legislative powers, with the Union retaining a role in specific areas such as lotteries. That division means a resident of one state can face a materially different legal position than a resident of a neighbouring state, even though both jurisdictions trace their gambling law back to the same nineteenth-century text. RoyalStakes exists to make that divergence legible, not to rank states as more or less permissive. We do not publish opinions on which regime is "better." We publish structured, side-by-side descriptions of what each state's framework says, with clear markers wherever a detail needs to be checked against the current gazette before anyone relies on it.
What you can do here
Compare two or three states
The Law Comparator lets you select states and see a fixed set of six criteria placed side by side, from base statute to regulator.
Read the common history
The Common Ancestor traces how one colonial statute became the starting point for every state framework discussed here.
Check definitions
The Glossary explains recurring terms such as "game of chance," "game of skill," "gazette" and "notification" in plain language.
A note on accuracy
This site is an independent legal-history reference. It does not provide legal advice, and nothing on it should be treated as a substitute for consulting the current official gazette text or a qualified legal professional. Statutory details, especially amendment dates and the exact wording of exemptions, change; every specific claim on this site carries a note to verify it against the current gazette text before publishing or relying on it elsewhere.