India has entered four of the Asian Games’ 11 esports events, and PUBG Mobile is not one of them
India’s 15-player esports contingent for Aichi-Nagoya covers League of Legends, Pokemon UNITE, eFootball and Puyo Puyo Champions. The medal event built on the game its whole competitive scene runs on was dropped back at the qualifying stage in March.
Sep 16, 2026
India’s esports team for the Asian Games is 15 players across four titles. The Games open in Aichi-Nagoya on 19 September and the esports programme runs from 23 September to 2 October at the Aichi International Exhibition Center in Tokoname. There are 11 medal events on that programme. One of them is PUBG Mobile, and India will not have a team in it.
What India is actually entering
The Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports cleared the 15-player contingent in August. Six go in League of Legends, captained by Akshaj Shenoy alongside Ahmed Shahid Israr, Rahul Bisht, Sanindhya Malik, Mihir Ranjan and Aakash Shandilya. Six more go in Pokemon UNITE under captain Adnan Mohammed Badshah, with Reuben Godfrey Fernandes, Sai Krishna Nalluri, Dipjyoti Laxman Nath, Rudra Narayan Nayak and Deepkumar Vipulbhai Patel. Chinmay Sahoo and Danial Shakeel Patel take the two eFootball slots. Paritosh goes alone in Puyo Puyo Champions.
Lokesh Suji, director of the Esports Federation of India, called the clearance “a significant milestone for Indian esports” when it came through.
The shape is familiar. India sent 15 players in four titles to Hangzhou in 2022, when esports was first a medal sport. The titles have changed, the headcount has not.
The title India did not enter
Back in March, the organisers of the National Esports Championships pulled PUBG Mobile out of India’s qualifying pathway altogether. Naraka: Bladepoint went with it, that one because barely anyone registered.
PUBG Mobile was dropped for a more tangled reason. The game itself has been blocked in India since the 2020 app ban and has never come back. What Indian players compete on is Battlegrounds Mobile India, the separate build Krafton made for the market, which had its own ban in July 2022 and returned in May 2023. The Asian Games event is PUBG Mobile, not BGMI, and the federation concluded that the regulatory position around the title plus the absence of a competitive community playing that specific version meant there was no national team to select.
So the medal event exists, India’s scene is enormous, and the two do not connect.
Where India’s best battle royale players will be instead
The scale of what is being left out is easy to measure. BMPS 2026 finished in Jaipur on 21 June with a four-crore prize pool, doubled from two crore a fortnight before it started, and GodLike Esports took it. The BGMI Showdown starts on 22 September in Hyderabad with a crore on the line and 48 teams chasing one slot at the Global Championship. That tournament overlaps almost exactly with the Asian Games esports window.
Which means that while 11 medals are handed out in Japan, the players with the deepest competitive base in Indian gaming will be in a convention centre in Hyderabad playing for something else entirely. There is no villain in that, but it is a strange way for a country’s biggest esport to spend an Asian Games.
The law says one thing, the entry list says another
The gap is sharper because of what changed last year. The Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act, 2025 gave esports statutory recognition in India for the first time and made the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports the nodal authority for promoting it. The stated aim included better representation for Indian players at global events.
A year on, India arrives at the biggest multi-sport esports event on the calendar with entries in League of Legends, a Pokemon game, a football sim and a puzzle game, and no entry in the battle royale its domestic scene is built around. Recognition and readiness are not the same thing, and this is what the distance between them looks like on an entry sheet.
The realistic hope is League of Legends and Pokemon UNITE, where India has six players each and has done the qualifying work. Puyo Puyo Champions, with one player, is the kind of entry that tells you a federation is covering ground rather than chasing a podium. The two six-player entries are the ones to watch from 23 September.