New Delhi: The central government is set to formally block Kalshi as soon as Friday, a senior government official said, as the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) moves to enforce its ban on prediction market platforms that have continued to operate in the country despite being declared illegal.
“We have already issued a blocking order to Polymarket and are in the process of issuing an order to Kalshi as soon as Friday,” a MeitY official told ThePrint requesting anonymity.
This comes weeks after the platforms were supposed to have gone dark.
The MeitY sent a letter, dated 25 April 2026, to VPN service providers, warning that users were accessing “illegal and blocked prediction market and online betting platforms” despite “domestic prohibitions”.
The advisory pointed specifically to Polymarket and similar prediction markets, which were supposed to be cut off by internet providers. That hasn’t happened. Despite the ban, Kalshi and Polymarket have continued to allow Indian users to sign up and trade on their prediction markets.
The move comes months after The Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act 2025, known as PROGA, was passed by both houses of Parliament in August 2025 and received Presidential assent the same month.
In April this year, the MeitY issued a series of gazette notifications operationalising PROGA and its accompanying rules, both of which came into force from 1 May. The government banned real-money gaming, recognised e-sports as a legitimate sport, and gave the country’s massive gaming market a uniform regulatory framework for the first time.
PROGA draws a three-way classification: e-sports, which are skill-based; social games, which are non-monetary; and online money games, which are completely prohibited, including their offering, advertising, and any associated financial transactions, with banks and financial institutions barred from processing payments to such platforms.
Games like RummyCircle’s rummy, Adda52’s poker, and Dream11’s fantasy cricket, previously protected as “skill games”, are now banned as online money games regardless of skill.
For Kalshi and Polymarket, both of which allow users to put real money on the outcome of events—from election results to oil prices—and collect winnings, the position is no different.
The blocking order is expected to come under Section 69A of the Information Technology Act rather than the new gaming legislation. Section 69A empowers the Central Government to restrict access to online content, including websites, apps, and social media profiles—the same provision that was used to ban TikTok in India.
Any intermediary that fails to comply with a direction issued under it can be punished with imprisonment for a term that may extend to seven years and is also liable to a fine.
The order goes to internet service providers, who are then required to block access to the relevant websites at the network level.
Deepro Guha, a policy expert at The Quantum Hub who tracks the online gaming space, said the enforcement picture is more complicated than a single blocking order.
The concern is mirror sites, where a platform that has been blocked simply relaunches under a different URL. A site banned today reappears as a slightly altered domain within weeks, and the cycle repeats. Guha said this, rather than VPN usage, is the more serious institutional problem. “The mirror sites problem becomes a real problem because that is happening at an institutional level, and to keep following that becomes really difficult.”
He drew a distinction between the two.
VPN usage—where an individual routes their traffic through a foreign server to access a blocked site—involves friction, slower speeds and unreliable connections, and tends to be limited to those specifically motivated to find a workaround.
Mirror sites require no extra effort from users at all.
Guha noted that Delhi High Court judge Justice Pratibha Singh had developed a legal innovation to address this problem in a copyright case, leaving a blocking order open-ended so complainants could return to the court and add new mirror URLs to the same order without filing fresh petitions.
On Polymarket and Kalshi specifically, Guha said the classification question requires little deliberation. “It’s the definition of betting. There’s no other way to get out of that.”
The government official cited above said the authority’s framework rests on the same three-way model embedded in PROGA: platforms with no money going in or out are social games; platforms where money flows both ways are e-sports or online gaming; and platforms with no money coming in but money going out also fall under the e-sports category.
Prediction markets fit none of those criterion.
Access to Kalshi in Brazil was blocked by the government last month, soon after the company announced its launch there. In the US, both Kalshi and Polymarket have offered their services nationwide, facing state regulators who allege they are violating state gambling laws.
Polymarket itself had been banned by the CFTC (Commodity Futures Trading Commission) for nearly three years before receiving regulatory clearance to re-enter the US market in September 2025.
(Edited by Ajeet Tiwari)
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