Blue Whale Challenge deaths: State governments are rightly banning the game, but is it effective?

Moneycontrol News 

Teenage deaths connected to the Blue Whale Challenge are not coming to an end. State governments are taking measures to stop this by issuing advisories and banning the game. But is this really the best way?

The Blue Whale challenge has claimed lives of young people across several states including Gujarat, West Bengal, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra and Punjab among others.

Most states are preferring a complete ban on the game.

Just a day back, Gujarat Chief Minister Vijay Rupani ordered a ban against the Blue Whale Challenge game.

CM Rupani, while issuing the ban, stressed that administration across all schools must be intimated so that students don’t fall prey to this deadly game.

Tamil Nadu government too banned the Blue Whale game after it saw its first alleged Blue Whale case death in August-end as a 19-year-old college student in Madurai hanged himself, with his mom pleading to the public to keep their children away from the deadly game.

Special public prosecutor in Tamil Nadu has given directions to police to take strict action against people sharing the link of the game on social media.

Also Read: Will act against social media firms on Blue Whale game: Ravi Shankar Prasad

Brainwashing and blackmail are the prime motivators of the game which is driving teenagers to death. The game's admins tell its participants about twisted outcomes if they fail to complete the tasks assigned to them.

Days back in another case of an alleged Blue Whale death, a girl rescued from a lake in Jodhpur with a whale carving on her arm, told the man who saved her that if she failed to complete the 'task' the game’s administrators would kill her mother.

As per a report in The Tribune, the State Commission for the Protection of Child Rights has sent a notice to the Punjab government to stop online access of Blue Whale game after a 17-year-old Ludhiana boy committed suicide after taking part in it. The request was forwarded to state-owned telecom operator BSNL.

Also Read: Govt asks Google, FB, MS, others to remove Blue Whale links

In a bid to tackle the spread of the Blue Whale Challenge, the Jammu and Kashmir government has also directed all educational institutes to launch awareness campaigns and set up counselling cells across districts adding that weekly report of this campaign must be sent to the directorate office.

Judges have stepped in as well. The Delhi High Court in a directive ordered all Internet giants to restrict anyone from uploading any material pertaining to the challenge, to which a response is still awaited.

However, in Kerala even after the government banned the game, a teenage boy died after he started playing the Blue Whale game in November last year as per a statement from his mother.

Also Read: India topped the world in Blue Whale Challenge searches over the past one year

Gujarat CM Vijay Rupani while issuing the ban also added that if needed, the state government would bring an ordinance to ban the game.

However, despite numerous bans and restrictions, questions have been raised about whether blocking is indeed an effective way to stop the game as the suicide game is not an app available for download but rather a one-on-one online interaction with the ‘administrators’ of the game.

A report in The New India Express stated that the Blue Whale Challenge was made available online under alternate names such as ‘A Silent House’, ‘A Sea of Whales’ and ‘Wake me Up at 4:20 AM’, thus increasing the technical barriers for blocking the game.

This implies that a ban limited to the game itself isn't enough but a search for all such games and challenges, identification and the collaboration with the internet service providers for a ban is necessary.

Its founder, who had been arrested by the Russian police a week back, had said he had started the game with the objective of “cleansing society”.

The string of deaths in India all started when a teenager in Mumbai uploaded a picture of him sitting on the roof parapet captioned “the only thing that you’d be left with is a picture of me”, following which he jumped from the seven-storey building.

(With inputs from PTI)