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India’s regional governments are intensifying pressure on New Delhi to create or block a national regulatory framework for online gaming, as the Supreme Court wraps up hearings in a case critical to the industry’s future.

The Supreme Court of India on Tuesday (August 12) concluded weeks of hearings into the applicability of a goods and services tax (GST) to online skill games, starting the clock on a ruling that will define not only fiscal railings for the gaming industry, but also its very feasibility across diverse political, commercial and economic environments.

However, key states are not waiting for the Supreme Court to issue a verdict before furthering their own regulatory or punitive plans, and this week has seen key governments ramp support for a national solution to enable or rule out gaming regulation.

Karnataka state, a high-tech and start-up hub now at the vanguard of a push for national regulation for online gaming, is openly calling for collaboration between states and the central government in the creation and maintenance of a regulatory scheme.

State information technology and biotechnology minister Priyank Kharge on Tuesday told the Karnataka Legislative Assembly that central and regional cooperation is crucial for adequate regulation and that the alternative is customer flight to foreign operators.

“There is a 28 percent GST on online gaming by the GST Council, so our people have stopped going for games hosted on servers here,” Kharge said.

“They are going for gaming being hosted on foreign servers like eastern Europe, South America or China servers. This makes it difficult for us to take action if there is fraud, as we don’t know who and where they are.”

State home minister G. Parameshwara told the Assembly that Karnataka is committed to a regulatory framework for online skill gaming that combats illegal gaming apps, pending delivery in September of a committee report and its recommendations.

Meanwhile, forces within the influential right-wing Hindu Janajagruti Samiti (HJS), an NGO that advocates Hindu supremacy, are accelerating gaming-hostile activities and may have tipped the government of India’s largest state into the anti-gaming camp.

Uttar Pradesh deputy chief minister Brajesh Pathak told delegates of the Surajya Abhiyan, a social welfare wing of the HJS leading a campaign for banning real-money online gaming, that the state will move a resolution requesting that the central government prohibits all online skill gaming with stakes, regardless of the Supreme Court outcome.

The possible Uttar Pradesh move follows reported commitments from the states of Goa and Chhattisgarh to file similar requests to the central government, potentially triggering a constitutionally mandated legislative intervention in matters usually determined by the states.

In a seemingly reformist order, the Allahabad High Court in May ordered the Uttar Pradesh government to formulate an online gaming regulatory framework to clarify legal grounds for gaming and to intervene in matters of wellbeing for younger Indians.

“Based upon the foregoing discussions, it's high time that a legislative framework be enacted to meet the transformative changes in online betting and gaming,” the order read.

While the Supreme Court’s eventual ruling will wield a momentous impact on the tax status and legality of online skill games with stakes, its enforceability across a national spectrum of economic pragmatism and ideological hostility embedded in confusion over central and state government constitutional rights is another matter.