Algorithms Without Guardians

The Ghaziabad tragedy is not a freak accident but a policy failure born of digital neglect and adult abdication.

Uttar Pradesh

The deaths of three minor sisters in Ghaziabad is a troubling indicator of India’s refusal to treat digital addiction among children as a serious social risk requiring regulation, literacy and early intervention.

At 16, 14 and 12, the sisters belonged to a generation that has grown up almost entirely inside screens. Their addiction to a Korean task-based online gaming app, established from a diary recovered from their home, suggests that the game had become central to how they understood themselves. When their parents barred them from playing, the girls apparently made a joint decision to end their lives.

What happened in Ghaziabad was an extreme manifestation of a broader, poorly acknowledged reality that Indian children are spending formative years in unregulated digital environments that shape behaviour, self-worth and emotional resilience while the adults responsible for them remain largely unprepared.

Many digital products aimed at adolescents are designed to reward compliance, persistence and immersion through points, rankings, praise and ‘tasks.’ Over time, these systems can displace offline sources of validation. Competence in the game becomes competence in life; failure or exclusion becomes existential rather than recreational.

Psychologists have warned for years that such dynamics can narrow a child’s emotional universe, especially when family life, schooling or peer relationships are already strained.

What happens when that universe collapses is not always predictable as India has no robust framework to help families navigate this transition. Most parents lack even basic digital literacy. They do not know what their children are playing, watching or internalising.

For many children, books have become an occasional obligation rather than a daily refuge. Screens now dominate leisure, learning and identity, leaving little space for the slow, solitary discipline that reading demands. What was once a habit of attention has become an economy of distraction.

As screens have expanded, books and deep reading have receded, taking with them the habits of reflection and emotional self-regulation they once quietly taught.

Furthermore, schools offer little backup and quality mental-health education remains marginal with teachers are seldom trained to identify behavioural signs of digital dependency. Adolescents who are emotionally isolated but digitally hyper-connected often pass unnoticed, so long as exam scores hold up. By the time distress surfaces, it is already acute.

The state’s response has been conspicuously inadequate. India regulates physical risks to children with enthusiasm. But the digital ecosystems where children spend hours daily operate in a regulatory vacuum. Gaming apps face minimal scrutiny beyond data and payments. There is no meaningful enforcement of age-appropriateness, no requirement for mental-health safeguards, and no obligation to provide crisis interventions for vulnerable users. Advisory guidelines exist, but they rely almost entirely on parental vigilance that policymakers know does not exist.

When tragedies occur, no one address the structural issue. Digital childhood has arrived without a safety architecture. Responsibility is diffused between parents who feel powerless, platforms that optimise for engagement, and regulators who treat online harm as either a moral panic or someone else’s problem.

Blaming one app will achieve little. India is among the world’s largest gaming and social-media markets. Its children are valuable users, and its regulatory choices shape global platform behaviour. Yet it has been slow to acknowledge that attention extraction can be as harmful as substance abuse when left unchecked, particularly for minors.

The Ghaziabad case should therefore prompt less outrage and more clarity. Children need graduated digital autonomy, not unrestricted access followed by sudden prohibition. Parents need tools, training and institutional support, not retrospective guilt. Schools need to integrate mental-health monitoring into daily practice, not treat it as an annual seminar topic. And the state needs to move beyond advisories towards enforceable standards for child-facing digital products.

None of this will eliminate risk as adolescence has always been volatile. But refusing to adapt to the realities of screen-mediated childhood makes that volatility more dangerous.