There is no doubt that children and young adults are glued to their smartphones all the time these days. However, it is for the elected executive and not the courts to address the psychological issues faced by them due to addiction to online & offline games, the Madras High Court said on Thursday.
The First Division Bench of Chief Justice Sanjib Banerjee and Justice Senthilkumar Ramamoorthy wrote, “It is only upon the failure of the executive to act and thereupon, the court, perceiving the matter to be a danger to society, ought to step in.”
The observations were made while disposing of a public interest litigation petition filed by advocate E. Martin Jayakumar seeking a direction to the Centre and the State government to ban all online and offline games. He insisted upon a mechanism to track devices used for attending online classes and playing games. The petitioner complained of online business enterprises preying on children and young adults by offering diverse games that were addictive. He perceived the addiction to be devastating and life threatening too in the sense that it destroys the career building phase of young adults and might even lead to suicidal tendencies and extreme anger against parents and elders seeking to check the habit.
Agreeing with the concern expressed by the petitioner, the judges wrote, “Oftentimes, a family could be together and sitting at a table but each member would be using the phone even to describe the dish that he may be having or the quality of the food at the moment.”
Nevertheless, “even constitutional courts should be slow in entering into such matters on the personal sense of morality of the individual complainant or of the judge or judges concerned”, the Bench said. It went on to state, “There is no doubt that when there is some illegal action or something which is detrimental to larger public interest, constitutional courts intervene; but in matters of the present kind, especially when elected governments are in place, such matters of policy must be left to the wisdom of those representing the people and having their mandate, instead of the court issuing a diktat.”
Opining that the issue on hand required a more wholesome and studied policy decision to be taken by the executive than what could be possible before any court, the judges permitted the petitioner to make representations to the Union Ministry of Women and Child Development as well as the State government within four weeks and ordered that such representations must be disposed of within eight weeks.
