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The Government of India has banned Battlegrounds Mobile India (BGMI). Alphabet Inc's Google and Apple pulled out the Krafton-developed game on July 28, 2022 citing directives from the Indian government. This ban comes a year after Tencent's Player Unknown's Battlegrounds (PUBG) was banned, the game BGMI is based on.
The ban comes a month after a 16-year-old boy allegedly shot his mother because she didn’t allow him from playing “online games like PUBG”. This incident was taken into parliamentary discussions during the running sessions where the Government talked about addressing similar apps which were banned.
Rajya Sabha MP V Vijayasai Reddy had questioned whether the IT Ministry was taking any action against apps like PUBG which pushed children to commit crimes when they were deprived of playing the game.
To this, Minister of State for Electronics & IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar responded, “There are various reports and grievances received in Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), conveying that apps that were blocked are appearing with new avatar by using similar sounding names or rebranded with the same functionality.”
“All such reports and grievances have been forwarded to Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA), the requesting agency, for examination. MeitY follows the due process as defined in the Information Technology (Procedure and Safeguards for Blocking for Access of Information by Public) Rules, 2009″.
“There was a media report that a child has killed his mother based on PUBG that he has been playing. This is a matter of investigation by LEAs to find the reason. But, the PUBG gaming app was blocked by MeitY in the year 2020 and the PUBG game is not available in India since then,” Chandrasekhar added.
Google also released a statement talking about how the ban was based on a ‘receipt of the order’. The statement also addressed that the developer was notified of the action and the app will remain as banned on the platform. The statement said, “On receipt of the order, following established process, we have notified the affected developer and have blocked access to the app that remained available on the Play Store in India.”