“Better To Do It Right Than Do It Fast”: Rajeev Chandrasekhar on regulating the gaming industry

Union Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar spoke extensively about the Indian online real money gaming industry and that the decisions by the GST council were taken after a lot of consideration. He also spoke on misinformation in India, and how, certain parties owe their existence to it

Speaking at CNN-News18’s Delhi Town Hall, Union Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar spoke candidly about misinformation and how certain political parties feed off of it, about regulation of upcoming industries and tech, such as online gaming, and how policies are not as much of a knee-jerk reaction as people assume them to be, and just how much deliberation goes into them.

When questioned that the government is often accused of letting industries flourish, and then regulating them, as has been the case with the online, real money gaming industry, Minister Chandrasekhar started by saying, “The GST Council is not the Government of India and is represented by all the state governments, so it is truly a federal organisation. State governments, state finance departments and the Government of India have come together and created a GST framework, after working on it for three years.”

He added, “While we may quibble and the industry may have issues with it, we have to recognise that the process to create a regulatory framework for online gaming started only in January 2023. We are still in the nascent stages of creating a predictable, sustainable and permissible online gaming framework. We will go back and request their considerations on the facts of the new regulatory framework.”

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“All the noise of this being anticonstitutional, “It is better to slowly progress and evolve in creating these frameworks that are sustainable than to do it in a hurry because you are reacting to a sound bite or an angry industry or a startup and make mistakes down the stream,” said Minister Chandrasekhar. “The Prime Minister is very clear – in the digital space, do everything from the perspective of the next decade, that is India’s Techade. All the laws and rules therefore go through detailed consultation with stakeholders,” he added.

The online gaming framework that has come out, went through 3 months of detailed consultations. What the government started with and what we ended with were completely different, he explained.

“So it is better to do it right than to do it fast,” he said.

He also took the moment to speak candidly about misinformation, and the government’s plans on approaching it. “Sometimes, the noise and the misinformation have submerged the benefits that could have come out of certain policies that have been opposed.”

“We are living in a digital age, where social media can create a lot of noise and a lot of static, where misinformation has the power to sway people, swap the truth and elevate the lies. That plays to the strength of some political parties, who actually survive on politics of misinformation and lies,” explained Minister Chandrasekhar.

“There are two ways to approach misinformation. We can do what the Congress did in UPA and put everybody in jail who put out a (political) cartoon or did something satirical, which is now being replicated in West Bengal, Kerala and Karnataka,” he said.

“We certainly don’t believe that misinformation is the same right to free speech. But there is a debate going on, on how do we deal with misinformation. We don’t want to be heavy-handed about it,” he added.

“We want there to be a consensus, where we create a public opinion that right to free speech should not be conflated with the power and weaponisation of misinformation, especially in a democracy like India, where we have 85 crore Indians online and will have about 125 crores Indians by 2025… Our approach is getting more and more people onboard, to understand that these are problems and then to legislate around the problem, rather than to use a stick,” he concluded.