Walk into almost any paan shop in a mid-sized Indian city, whisper the right word, and a small plastic device will slide across the counter wrapped in a newspaper. No receipt, no age check, no brand name you’d recognize from a store shelf — because officially, none of this is supposed to exist. India banned the production, sale, and advertising of e-cigarettes back in 2019. Seven years on, Moneycontrol reports that an underground vape market is thriving anyway, delivering flavored nicotine to anyone with a smartphone and a little patience, prohibition or not.
It’s a story that should sound familiar to anyone who has watched a government try to legislate away a product people actually want. But the scale and persistence of India’s vape underground — as described by Moneycontrol — is a useful case study in what happens when a ban outlaws a product without killing the demand that created it.
A Ban That Banned the Wrong Thing
India’s 2019 law was sweeping on paper: no manufacturing, no importing, no selling, no advertising of e-cigarettes and similar devices. What it didn’t do, notably, was criminalize possession or personal use. That’s the loophole — or rather, the canyon — through which the entire underground trade now flows. According to Moneycontrol’s reporting, the market has simply moved from shopfronts to encrypted chats, Instagram DMs, and courier deliveries, with sellers operating in the open-secret way that unlicensed liquor and pirated software have long operated in India.
The mechanics are almost mundane in their simplicity: a customer messages a seller, transfers money digitally, and a package shows up days later, often disguised or mislabeled to slip past casual scrutiny. No age verification. No ingredient disclosure. No quality control on the nicotine concentration or the chemicals used to flavor it. In a legal market, all of that would typically be regulated. In this one, none of it is — which is precisely the paradox critics of prohibition-style bans have long warned about.
Why Bans on Popular Habits Tend to Backfire
This isn’t a uniquely Indian phenomenon, and it isn’t really about vaping specifically. It’s about what happens whenever a government tries to eliminate a consumer habit through blanket prohibition rather than regulation. Alcohol prohibition eras, unlicensed gambling, and counterfeit pharmaceuticals all follow a similar arc: demand doesn’t vanish because supply becomes illegal, it just becomes harder to see, harder to police, and often more dangerous.
With vaping specifically, the stakes are sharpened by the fact that the customer base skews young. E-cigarettes market themselves globally on flavor and discretion — exactly the traits that make them appealing to teenagers and young adults experimenting with nicotine for the first time. A regulated market can restrict sales by age, cap nicotine strength, and mandate warning labels. An underground one can’t be bothered with any of that, because the entire point of operating underground is to avoid exactly the kind of oversight that would make those safeguards possible.
The Enforcement Problem Nobody Wants to Own
Part of what makes this persist is sheer logistics. India is enormous, its retail economy is famously decentralized, and enforcement resources that might crack down on organized vape distribution are stretched thin across a dozen other priorities. A ban that relies on customs seizures and occasional raids is fighting a supply chain that has adapted to operate in small, deniable units — a few devices here, a courier package there — rather than the large, visible shipments that are easy to intercept.
There’s also a pricing irony worth sitting with. Banned products in an underground market often become more expensive, not less, because sellers price in the risk of getting caught. That should, in theory, suppress demand. But for a product marketed heavily on lifestyle appeal and social currency among young, often affluent users, price sensitivity doesn’t behave the way basic economics textbooks predict. If anything, scarcity has arguably added a layer of illicit allure — the vape pen as an accessory that says you know a guy.
What Regulation Advocates Say Should Happen Instead
Public health researchers globally have long argued that outright prohibition is rarely the most effective tool against nicotine products, precisely because it cedes the entire market to actors with zero accountability. The more common policy path in countries that have taken vaping seriously as a public health issue is regulation rather than elimination: age-gating sales, taxing products to fund health programs, mandating disclosure of chemical contents, and restricting the marketing tactics — flavors, packaging, social media promotion — that are shown to appeal disproportionately to minors.
India’s current framework offers none of those levers, because it was built on the premise that the product simply shouldn’t exist in the market at all. Moneycontrol’s reporting suggests that premise hasn’t held up against seven years of lived reality. The demand is there. The supply chain has adapted. And the regulatory vacuum that resulted means the government has essentially traded a manageable, visible market for an unmanageable, invisible one.
The Bigger Question Ahead
None of this means India was wrong to worry about vaping’s health risks — the concerns that drove the 2019 ban, including nicotine addiction and unknown long-term effects, were and remain legitimate. But the years since suggest the policy tool didn’t match the problem. A ban without enforcement teeth and without a legal alternative simply pushed a habit into the shadows rather than curbing it.
The pressure this creates on policymakers isn’t going away. As the underground market matures — building brand loyalty, refining delivery logistics, and normalizing itself as just another category of contraband alongside black-market alcohol or counterfeit electronics — the case for revisiting the ban entirely, in favor of a regulated and taxed model, will only grow louder among public health advocates. Whether India’s government is willing to have that conversation, or whether it will keep betting that stricter enforcement can eventually catch up to a market that has had seven years to adapt, remains the open question hanging over this whole saga.
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