Keonjhar: Due to the crucial Covid situation following which schools and colleges have been closed till date since the beginning of the nationwide lockdown, online teaching appears to have been showing its very bad effects on the immature school students as they are resorting to misuse of the smartphones.
A glaring instance is the shocking death of a school student who committed suicide after losing money from the bank accounts of his parents to the online game ‘Free Fire’.
Such an incident has taken place at Kamarjoda slum of Joda industrial town in the district here on Friday morning and the deceased has been identified as 14-year-old Amitanshu Apat who was found hanging from the bathroom ventilator of their house using her mother’s saree.
As per reports, the deceased was a class VIII student of Joda’s Kundurunala-based Saraswati Sishu Vidya Mandir. He was a meritorious student and had secured 92% in the last annual examination. His father Vinod Apat had purchased him a smartphone cost Rs 13,000 for the mandatory online class. However, the boy had spent Rs 35,000 last month from his father’s SBI account while playing the online ‘Free Fire’ game. Later on, he had spent Rs 61,000 from her mother’s SBI account in the same manner. Inquiring into the matter at the bank, his father came to know about the costly online game.
Vinod questioned his son Amitanshu on Thursday, but the boy was found having committed suicide the very next morning.
While the father is a contractor, the mother is an Anganwadi worker.
Notably, ‘Free Fire’ is an online game in which two sides try to kill each other by firing bullets. The player who remains alive is finally declared as the winner. To join this game, one has to deposit online Rs 10,000 to the company. While playing the game, the player has to purchase bullets for which the money gets deducted gradually from the registered bank account online. ‘Free Fire’ has also been awarded as the most popular video game available in the Google playstore.
Now the aggrieved parents have demanded to immediately ban this online game as it has been taking a toll on the younger generation.