Gaming ban: A down payment to secure the demographic dividend

India must protect the financial, mental and physical health of the country's youth from the adverse effects of a deadly troika

- V. ANANTHA NAGESWARAN

Rajagopalachari was, by instinct, a free marketeer. As chief minister of the erstwhile Madras state, he abolished controls on foodgrains as well as public procurement and increased their market availability.

Yet, he braved pouring rain in his old age and went to plead with M. Karunanidhi, who was by then chief minister of the state (renamed Tamil Nadu) not to withdraw the prevailing prohibition on alcohol and arrack sales. This ban had made some parts of the alcohol preparation and sales business go underground. Illicit liquor had emerged and some died chasing it. But the absence of easy and lawful availability was a huge deterrent to consumption.

Given how dirt-poor India was in those days, Rajagopalachari was willing to accept the trade-offs involved in not following market-economy principles in certain areas. India is not dirt-poor anymore. It is a lower middle-income country with aspirations to become developed by 2047. But the trade-offs are still relevant, and they do exist.

Humans often don't contemplate the counterfactual, let alone comprehend it. In the case of India's recent bill on the Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming that got the approval of Parliament last week, followed by the President's assent, it is easy for many to argue conceptually that the games would go underground, and so would gamers. They may well be right. What they fail to appreciate is the counterfactual scenario: the unbridled growth of gaming in the country and its consequences. Let me provide some orders of magnitude here.