PIL to Ban PUBG – Punjab Lawyer Compares it to Drugs
A new Public Interest Litigation (PIL) has been filed to ban the multiplayer battle royale game PUBG by a lawyer named HC Arora from Chandigarh, Punjab.
The High Court had earlier asked the Union Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology to take a decision on the matter.
The direction of the high court to consider and make a decision representation to ban PUBG is being examined by the ministry, as per VK Trivedi, Director, Cyber Laws and Security at the ministry.
The Union Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology has sent a communication to HC Arora.
In the PIL, HC Arora claimed that PUBG normalises violence and is addictive, leading to adverse effects on players’ mental and physical health. He also compared playing PUBG to drugs, a problem that has been prevalent among the state’s youth.
As per the PIL, school children, whose interest in studies is waning, become addicted to PUBG. The PIL also stresses that when one insists such children to quit playing the game, they tend to become aggressive and go in depression.
In the past, PUBG was briefly banned in Gujarat and Chennai. Last year, Police Commissioner Manoj Agrawal banned the game stating that it leads to violent attitude among youth, besides adversely affecting their studies, behavior, conduct and language.
In December 2019, H. Vasanthakumar, an Indian National Congress (INC) MP from Kanyakumari, Tamil Nadu in a zero hour mention in the Lok Sabha, also urged the government to ban games like PUBG and Blue Whale, citing that such games have adverse effects on mental and physical health of children.
Even in China, the home country of the game, there were time-limiting sanctions on the game. In the past, in Nepal, Nepal Telecommunications Authority had ordered mobile providers, network service providers and ISPs to block PUBG. This order was later stayed by Nepal’s Supreme Court.
On the other hand, many studies, including a recent one at the Oxford University have findings opposing the popular beliefs, which state that video games do not have any effect on people’s tendencies towards violence.
