Govt wakes up to Blue Whale threat

Hyderabad: The Blue Whale Challenge game, which is catching the imagination of the youngsters by hooking them on to the dangerous online game, has come under the scrutiny of the government forcing it to instruct the popular social networking platforms to pull off all the links and its variants too.

The game, which has its origin in Russia, allegedly psychologically stimulates the players to indulge in daring, self-destructive tasks for 50 days before finally taking the 'winning' step of killing themselves, and each task must be filmed and shared as ‘proof’. "Instances of children committing suicide while playing Blue Whale Challenge have been reported in India...You are hereby requested to ensure that any such link of this deadly game in its own name or similar game is immediately removed from your platform," the IT Ministry said in a letter to the internet majors -- Facebook, WhatsApp, Google and Yahoo.

On July 30, a 14-year-old schoolboy Manpreet Singh Sahani allegedly walked off the fifth floor of his building in Andheri East of Mumbai. Prior to his death leap, the Class 9 student texted a friend of his intentions: "I am going to the building to jump", and before anybody could rush to help him, he had already jumped off. His friends claim that he was playing "The Blue Whale" and when he spoke of not attending school anymore and about the suicide, most dismissed it lightly.

Explaining about the addiction of such games, Dr Namita Singh, neuro psychologist at Apollo, said, “Mostly teenagers are drawn to such self-harm games because majority of them think that it is ‘cool’ or ‘hip’. Especially, children below 18 years feel rebellious because they are restricted to participate in many things. But without even realising these children are going into depression because of such sites. Some kids join these communities because they feel lonely and there is no parental attention given to them.”

Expressing concern of such challenges, Priyanka, a 30-year-old resident of Madhapur, said, “The foreign entertainment industry has been focusing on this subject off late. A movie “Nerve”, directed by Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost, is loosely based on the Blue Whale Challenge. The American show ‘13 Reasons Why’ is also based on teenage suicides. Indian media should also shed some light on these suicide sites and create awareness against these challenges among the youngsters.”

Gaming is big industry which is being exploited with innovative ideas. But the Blue Whale Challenge is at the extreme end of spectrum to become popular. Ravi Kiran, Founder of Golive gaming company, said, “Everyone is calling this a game but this is not even remotely related to gaming.

This is just a deranged person asking teenagers to follow tasks that lead to death. There are around 600 gaming companies in India and due to such suicidal sites the gaming industries’ reputation should not be damaged.”

Though the authorities ordered a ban on this game, there is numerous other suicide or self-harm sites mushrooming on the internet. As such sites can be created anonymously from any corner of the world.

KCS Raghuveer, ACP (CyberCrime), said that no suicides were reported in the city related to this suicidal game. “As of now the cyber crime police have no information about any downloads of this particular game,” he said.

By: Tera Sneha Reddy