The Ministry for Women and Child Development on Monday said that it has asked the Centre to ban the online game Blue Whale Challenge, which is believed to assign players various tasks during a 50-day period and ends with the player committing suicide.
The ministry said Maneka Gandhi had taken up the matter with Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh and Information and Technology Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad. “Maneka Gandhi has taken cognisance of the self-destructive Blue Whale challenge that has claimed the lives of over 100 youngsters,” the ministry said on Twitter. “Gandhi has requested that the challenge be removed from social media by suitable intervention.”
She also urged parents to monitor the activities of their children, and dissuade them from participating in such online challenges.
The National Commission for Protection of Child Rights had written to the Electronics and Information Technology Ministry three times since May about the threat that this online game poses, an unidentified ministry spokesperson told PTI.
It is believed that a 14-year-old boy who jumped off the fifth floor of a building in Mumbai earlier in August had been influenced by the game. Last week, a Class 5 student in Dehradun, who too had taken up the challenge, was stopped from killing himself, PTI reported.
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