Escalating Corporate and Managerial Criminal Liability Under PROGA and the Case for DPAs in India

India’s Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act, 2025 (hereinafter referred to as “PROGA”) passed recently, shows a potential escalation in already congested corporate criminal enforcement, now extending to the gaming sector, as it explicitly expands liability for online gaming while criminalising previously regulatory breaches. The PROGA also imposes liabilities on finance facilitators, with a grey area between ‘in-app purchase’ and ‘money for gambling,’ and this widening of the statutory severity collides with India’s current structural enforcement crisis. Currently, white-collar crimes achieve a mere twenty-nine % conviction rate, with around ninety-four % case pendency; this reflects the drawback of overreliance on punitive prosecution without other mechanisms for ensuring self-accountability, restitution, or systemic compliance among corporations. We argue that PROGA’s stringent provisions will potentially exacerbate judicial congestion and be enforced with less efficiency, as online gaming is a fast-changing sector, and till the traditional method enforces its liability, a lot will have changed. Therefore, we argue that India can adopt Deferred Prosecution Agreements (hereinafter referred to as “DPAs”) as a structured middle-path enforcement mechanism. We do the doctrinal analysis of PROGA’s liability provisions and comparative examination of DPA regimes in other regimes. We demonstrate that DPAs can simultaneously secure accountability while unlocking investigative and prosecutorial resources for cases requiring traditional criminal adjudication for individuals to mandatory judicial approval; we argue that with a tailored DPA for India, the transparency requirements and individual liability can both be balanced. We also attempt to legally analyse the potential challenges for implementing DPA in India and propose solutions accordingly. We propose a limited Indian DPA model bounded by non-negotiable safeguards, including factual admissions, restitution mandates, and compliance monitoring. This approach can allow online gaming sector entities to self report or accept negligence and pay damages.