Law ยท Statute
The National Sports Governance Act, 2025
The Act on the governance of sport in India. For this site's purposes its importance is that it is the statute under which e-sports are recognised.
- Kind
- Act
- Year
- 2025
- Law stated as at
What it does
The National Sports Governance Act, 2025 is a statute on the governance of sport in India. This page is deliberately short. The site has not yet published a note on the Act as a whole, and the page therefore states only what the site's own published work says about it and does not describe the machinery of the Act from memory.
The Act matters to the site because of the law on online games. The site's note on online money games after the prohibition explains that the Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act, 2025 came into force on 1 May 2026 and prohibits online money games, and that what it promotes is a narrower set of activities: e-sports recognised under the National Sports Governance Act, 2025, and online social games played without stakes. The recognition of e-sports is therefore made under this Act.
Who it binds
On the point the site covers, the Act touches the organisers and platforms of e-sports. The note describes e-sports as an online game played as part of a multi sports event in organised competitive form, recognised under this Act, with an outcome determined solely by skill. The definition in the gaming statute allows a registration or participation fee and prize money based on performance. A platform that wants to rely on that definition has to show that its game has been recognised, and the recognition comes from this Act.
What has changed, and when
The Act is dated 2025. The site has not stated the date from which its provisions are in force, and this page does not do so either. The gaming statute referred to above came into force on 1 May 2026, and the tax consequences of the years before that survived the prohibition, according to the Supreme Court's decision of 27 May 2026 as recorded in the same note.
What turns on it in practice
A business that offers a game for money has to decide which side of the line it is on. If the game is an online money game, it is prohibited, and the question of skill or chance no longer saves it. If the business says that its game is an e-sport, it must be recognised under this Act. A business that relies on the status without the recognition has no answer to the prohibition.
The firm's work on the gaming statute therefore reads this Act for the single purpose of testing whether a game is within the e-sports exception. It does not offer a view here on the other parts of the Act, such as the governance of sporting bodies, which are outside what the site has published.
Reference