Does India Need a Digital Addiction Policy?

In January 2026, when India's Chief Economic Advisor V. Anantha Nageswaran raised awareness about digital addiction at his Economic Survey briefing, it landed differently than most policy observations do. The Survey identified digital addiction as a rising problem impacting the mental health of youth and adults, encouraged families to promote screen-time limits and device-free hours, and noted measures by countries including Australia, China, and South Korea as reference points.

Nageswaran was measured in his prescription. He said state governments were exploring age-based access policies but added that these things "need not necessarily be only at the policy level," naming families, schools, and civil society as equal stakeholders. That framing is one of the most honest things anyone in a position of authority has said on this subject anywhere in the world. 

Rina Ghosh, a teacher and counsellor with 25 years of experience working with children under the age of 12 at St. Thomas’ Church School in West Bengal, agrees. She is now retired from formal teaching but still engaged in active counselling work with young children. Ghosh has watched the problem escalate in recent years. She said, "Five years ago, I was seeing maybe one or two children a term who I would describe as genuinely struggling with their relationship with a screen. Now it is the majority, not the exception."

What Other Countries Have Tried 

China is the place everyone looks at first, because China has gone the furthest to curb digital addiction. Minors in China are limited to three hours of gaming per week, specifically on weekends and public holidays, and game publishers are required to implement real-name registration systems to enforce these time limits. The rules were tightened significantly in August 2021, and have continued tightening since.

During the month-long winter school holiday in January 2025, children under 18 were capped at roughly 15 to 16 hours of total gaming time, with Tencent and NetEase both confirming compliance with the restrictions. The enforcement mechanism is technically ambitious. It requires real-name verification tied to national ID numbers, with some platforms deploying facial recognition to catch minors using adult accounts. 

On paper, the headline figures look like a policy success. A 2022 report by the state-affiliated China Game Industry Research Institute declared that over 75% of minors spent fewer than three hours a week gaming and that authorities had curbed "internet addiction." The government presented these numbers as proof that the framework was working. 

Research by Cato Institute found no causal link between the playtime regulations and improved health outcomes, and found a 14% higher chance of gamers playing heavily during any given week. A survey revealed that 77% of minors used other people's identities, a parent's or older friend's, for game account registrations. 59% of teen gamers simply migrated to Douyin, China's TikTok equivalent, which only regulates users under 14 compared to the under-18 limits on video games.

Following the 2021 regulation changes, Tencent's stock dropped over 8% while NetEase's fell around 11%. When the government merely proposed further regulations in December 2023, Tencent lost 12.3% of its stock value, and roughly $100 billion USD was erased from the Chinese gaming market in a single trading session. Ubisoft and Prosus saw stock declines as ripple effects spread internationally. A black market for gaming accounts also emerged quickly, with sellers offering unregulated accounts to minors at inflated prices and thousands of children being scammed in the process. 

What China's experiment demonstrates, above everything else, is that restricting one platform or category of content does not reduce screen time. It simply redirects it. Moving a child from Honor of Kings to Douyin is not a public health win, even if it looks like one in the gaming-specific data.

Ghosh recognizes this dynamic immediately when it is described to her. "Children are very clever. If you close one door, they will find the window. The question is not which app they are on; it is why they need to be on it for so many hours. A government cannot substitute good parenting. We need parents to take responsibility too and spend time with their children to help with their addiction."

South Korea offers a different kind of case study, one that at least ends with an honest conclusion. The Cinderella Law, introduced in 2011, banned children under 16 from playing online games between midnight and 6 am, enforced through South Korea's national resident registration numbers. 

For a decade, it sat on the books, generating controversy in roughly equal measure to compliance. The practical problems were significant. The law caused a major headache for Microsoft when Minecraft unintentionally became an adults-only game in South Korea because of its Xbox Live integration, making a game recommended for children aged 12 and older accessible only to those 19 and above. The law also did not apply to console games or smartphones, meaning a fairly large loophole was built into the framework from day one.

In January 2022, the National Assembly repealed the Shutdown Law. The decision acknowledged what had become difficult to ignore: government-mandated curfews could not replace family-level decisions about screen time. South Korea replaced it with a parental opt-in system, where guardians designate approved gaming hours for their children. The shift was, in effect, a public admission that the law had not achieved what it set out to do, and that sustainable intervention required putting decision-making back with parents rather than servers. 

Australia is the most recent and most closely watched example. From December 10, 2025, platforms including TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, and YouTube were required to prevent Australians under 16 from holding accounts, with fines for non-compliance. 

Within the first three months, the regulator raised significant concerns about five major gaming and social media platforms, finding that many children under 16 still had active accounts or could create new ones. The enforcement was largely reactive, and account removals had not yet corresponded with measurable reductions in reported harm from cyberbullying or image-based abuse. 

Australia's ban is still young and deserves more time before a full verdict. But the first-quarter data does suggest that removing accounts is not the same thing as reducing harm, and that teenagers motivated to stay online will find ways to do so.

Where India Stands on Digital Addiction

India has over 500M gamers, second only to China by volume. The mobile gaming surge of the last decade, driven by affordable data plans and low-cost Android hardware, reached cities and towns that console gaming had never reached. The scale of harm that accumulated alongside that growth is harder to quantify precisely, but difficult to dismiss. Reports cited 47 suicides linked to gaming addiction in Tamil Nadu alone over five years, and investigations found that some gaming platforms had been used for money laundering and, in some cases, terror financing— reasons the government used to frame the issue as both a public health and national security matter.

The legislative response was the Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act (PROGA), passed in August 2025, with operational rules that came into force on May 1, 2026. The rules ban online money games entirely, establish the Online Gaming Authority of India (OGAI) as a centralized digital-first regulator, and extend the law's reach to offshore platforms targeting Indian users. 

The rules also mandate age verification, parental controls, time limits, and counselling support as user safety features, calibrated to each platform's risk profile. It suggests a framework capable of being tightened as the regulator develops a better read of the landscape.

But the PROGA framework is, at its core, a financial regulation. It protects people from losing money on predatory platforms. The broader and arguably more urgent question of recreational gaming addiction—  children playing for hours at night, disrupted sleep, declining academic performance, social withdrawal— sits almost entirely outside its scope. That is the question Nageswaran's Economic Survey was pointing toward, and it is the one that remains unanswered.

Ghosh sees the gap clearly from where she sits. She said, "The families I speak to are not worried about their child losing money on an app. They are worried about a child who will not eat dinner without a phone in front of them, who cries when the Wi-Fi goes out, and who has stopped playing outside altogether. That problem does not have a law yet. We need to take measures as a society, both at a personal level and at the government level, to address it."

India’s Position on Digital Addiction 

Across all of these cases, a few things become clear when you look at the data rather than the press releases. Hard curfews and blanket bans consistently drive behavior underground rather than eliminate it. Children use fake IDs, migrate to less-regulated platforms, or find technical workarounds within days. The Chinese experience is the most documented, but the pattern holds in South Korea and Australia, too.

A restriction that does not account for the underlying motivation, whether boredom, social connection, escape, or anxiety, will not address the behavior. 

Platform-level accountability, where the legal obligation sits with companies rather than with families, appears more structurally sound. Australia's model of significant fines for non-compliant platforms is newer and needs a longer evaluation period, but it is at least pointed at the right target. The problem was designed into the product. Holding the product's maker responsible is more logical than asking a twelve-year-old to resist it.

What appears to move the needle most sustainably, based on the post-Cinderella Law experience in South Korea, is parental agency paired with genuine education. When families understand the risk, have usable tools to manage screen time, and are supported rather than replaced by policy, outcomes are more durable. It is less satisfying as a policy announcement; there is no press conference when a parent sits down with their child and agrees on phone rules. But the evidence leans toward it.

Ghosh, who has spent decades watching how children respond to rules set by adults, is not surprised by any of this. According to her children often find workarounds and it is difficult to enforce them. She said, "Rules that come from inside the family, stick. That is true for screen time, and it is true for everything else. Digital addiction is a growing problem based on my interactions with children, and it is affecting their ability to perform in school. We need to do something fast."

For India, the gap between what PROGA is doing and what Nageswaran's survey flagged is real and worth naming plainly. Financial addiction and recreational addiction are related but distinct problems. India has moved with some decisiveness on one. The other, the quiet and unspectacular erosion of sleep, attention, and childhood that does not involve anyone losing money, still has no framework, no dedicated regulator, and no clear government position. That is not unusual for India alone, as no country has fully solved it. But with India being large enough and with its mobile gaming penetration deep enough, the absence of a plan is worrying.