Gambling addiction help in India

Verified helplines

Helplines and online chat

There is no dedicated gambling helpline in India. The number to call is Tele-MANAS, the National Tele Mental Health Programme, on 14416 or 1800-891-4416. It is free, available 24 hours a day across the country and in 20 Indian languages, and it offers telephone counselling, psychotherapy, psychiatric consultation and referral, including urgent care. Launched in October 2022, it works in two tiers: a state Tele-MANAS cell answers, and escalates to specialists where needed.

Gambling is not named in the service's description, so say plainly at the start that the problem is gambling and money — otherwise the call is likely to be handled as generalised anxiety.

One correction worth making, because old directories still repeat it: the KIRAN helpline on 1800-599-0019 was merged into Tele-MANAS on 15 February 2024 and then phased out. Do not rely on it.

Gamblers Anonymous lists two meetings in India — a Friday evening group in New Delhi (hotline +91 88269 04945) and a Saturday evening open meeting at the YMCA in Secunderabad, Hyderabad. Call before travelling; the listings carry no update date. Lines in other countries are in the helplines directory.

Self-exclusion

There is no self-exclusion register in India, at national or state level. The Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act, 2025 and the rules made under it in April 2026 create no register and no exclusion mechanism; nor does any state statute. What existed before the ban were voluntary industry codes maintained by gaming federations, which were never statutory and now apply to products that are largely prohibited.

The closest thing to a statutory player-protection tool was Tamil Nadu's 2025 regulations for online real-money games, which required operators to offer daily, weekly and monthly spending limits, to interrupt play with caution messages after an hour, and to shut off logins between midnight and 5am. Those obligations are largely overtaken by the nationwide ban.

In the absence of a register, blocking has to be done at your end: device-level software, removing saved payment methods, and letting someone else hold the card. See apps that block gambling sites, and self-exclusion by country for how formal schemes work elsewhere.

Blocking gambling payments and sites

The 2025 Act attacks the money rather than the player. Section 7 bars any bank, financial institution or payment facilitator from processing a transaction towards an online money gaming service, and the 2026 rules require them to suspend or discontinue such transactions without delay when the Online Gaming Authority of India directs it. Under the Reserve Bank of India's rules on outward remittance, sending money abroad for lottery tickets, sweepstakes and similar purposes is prohibited.

None of that is a switch a customer can flip. No Indian bank was found to publish a gambling-transaction block of the kind UK banks offer, so the practical route remains device-level blocking and keeping day-to-day money out of easy reach. If losses have already turned into borrowing, see what to do about gambling debt.

Free treatment and counselling

Tele-MANAS counselling is free and reaches the whole country by phone, which matters where the nearest psychiatrist is a day's travel away.

For continuing care, the District Mental Health Programme is the main public route. It has been approved for 767 districts and staffs each with a psychiatrist, a clinical psychologist, a psychiatric social worker and psychiatric or community nursing, providing outpatient and inpatient care with follow-up. Above that sit 47 government-run mental hospitals, including the three central institutions — NIMHANS in Bengaluru, LGBRIMH in Tezpur and the Central Institute of Psychiatry in Ranchi — with mental health services also available at every AIIMS.

Under the Mental Healthcare Act, 2017, people living below the poverty line, and people who are destitute or homeless, are entitled to mental health treatment and services free of charge, whether or not they hold a below-poverty-line card, and essential medicines are free at government-run establishments.

NIMHANS runs a Service for Healthy Use of Technology (SHUT) at its Centre for Well Being in Bengaluru. It is directed at technology and screen use rather than gambling, so treat it as a related service, not the destination.

Support for family and friends

India gives families no legal lever comparable to the third-party exclusion available in South Africa or Korea: there is no register to add someone to, and no operator to notify. What is available is the Tele-MANAS line, which takes calls from family members as readily as from the person gambling, and the two Gamblers Anonymous groups in Delhi and Hyderabad, which hold open meetings that relatives can attend.

Because the formal tools are missing, the household ones carry more weight — separating accounts, refusing to cover losses, and agreeing who holds what. See how to help someone with a gambling problem and the signs of a gambling problem.

Gambling law and the regulator

The Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act, 2025 received assent on 22 August 2025 and came into force on 1 May 2026. It prohibits offering, aiding or inducing any online money game — defined to cover games played for stakes irrespective of whether they are based on skill, chance or both — along with their advertising and the payment services behind them. Penalties reach three years' imprisonment and a fine of ₹1 crore for offering such a game, and two years and ₹50 lakh for advertising it; offences under sections 5 and 7 are cognizable and non-bailable.

The Act does not penalise the individual player. Its operative sections target those who offer, advertise or finance online money gaming. Anyone in India who is afraid that asking for help means confessing to a crime should know that the ban is aimed elsewhere. The government put the case for it in terms of scale: around 45 crore people affected and losses exceeding ₹20,000 crore.

Regulation is split. The Online Gaming Authority of India, constituted in April 2026 as an attached office of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, registers permissible games, decides whether a game counts as a money game and handles grievances — for online gaming only. Betting and gambling otherwise sit with the states under Entry 34 of the State List, which is why land-based casinos operate in Goa, Daman and Sikkim under state law and why states such as Tamil Nadu passed their own online gambling bans. Lotteries are governed separately by the Lotteries (Regulation) Act, 1998, under which each state government decides whether to run or prohibit lottery sales in its territory. A constitutional challenge to the 2025 Act is pending before the Supreme Court, which agreed in August 2026 to hear it finally; the Act has not been stayed.