Saturday, 20 May 2023

DGV - INFORMATIVE NEWS

 DGV - INFORMATIVE NEWS

Information date : 20.12.2004.

Several boys studying at the Delhi Public School (DPS) exchanged explicit photo clips of a female student engaged in a lewd act with a classmate on their cellular phones in the middle of last month.

Since then the two-and-a-half-minute Multimedia Message Service (MMS) clip has been blown into a huge scandal with the police, parents, educationists, sociologists and others joining the fray to take measure of the changing mores of new-age youngsters who are now doubly armed with hefty allowances and access to a “bare-all, dare-all” Internet. 

Within days, the MMS clip featuring the two students from one of Delhi's more prominent public schools found its way into the underground pornography market.

Unscrupulous smut VCD and DVD dealers transferred the short clip onto magnetic tape.

Combining it with the latest scandal involving a 17-year-old schoolgirl from Jammu who was videotaped having sex with a photographer in a cheap hotel, they sold it like hot cakes, calling it the DPS MMS Clip.

Because the boy and girl involved in the DPS scandal belonged to upper crust families, because the more than 60-year-old school had a cachet about it with parents going to great lengths to get their children admitted in it and because there was a voyeur inside most sexually repressed Indians, the demand for the short clip which the errant boy had filmed using his cellular phone camera was tremendous. 

Initially, the clip of the girl performing a sexual act on the boy sold only for Rs40 (RM3.45) but when the scandal became the talk of the town its price shot up to Rs200 (RM17.30). 

In days after the scandal made headlines, Delhi’s chattering classes was divided between those who had seen the clip and those who had not. 

The school's management was embarrassed into summarily expelling the two students who had brought it notoriety. 

Though no names were given, the media followed their trail given the tremendous curiosity the salacious escapade had aroused in the lay society. 

The boy belonged to an upper crust South Delhi business family and played for the Under–17 Delhi Cricket Team in the All India Inter-School Competition.

The girl was the daughter of a senior Indian Army officer whose family felt so disgraced by the scandal that they soon packed her off to a distant relative in faraway Canada. 

There were reports that her father was so shattered by the “dishonour” she had brought to the family that he suffered a heart attack and had to be admitted into a specialist heart institute. 

The boy found admission in yet another prestigious school in Delhi, thanks to the pull of his rich parents.

Though he had not only filmed the sex act on his mobile phone but had also transmitted it to his friends, surprisingly the police did not take any action against him. 

The law does not distinguish between juvenile and major offenders except that they could be charged under the Juvenile Act.

In fact, even the girl could have been booked for indulging in an obscene act even though she was filmed doing so without her knowledge. 

The scandal, however, showed no sign of receding from the front pages. 

Even as the police went after the sellers of the CDs and seized a whole lot of them, its traders surfaced on the Internet. 

A popular website which facilitates the sale and purchase of all things Internet users want to sell or buy had been used to hawk the CDs.

The Delhi police first tracked down the eight buyers, including two from the capital, who had bought the CDs through the Internet portal.

The Information Technology Act empowers the police to prosecute the maker, seller and buyer of Internet pornography.

Eventually, the police traced the seller of the CDs on the portal to the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur.

The arrested student was remanded by a Delhi court on Dec 16 after the prosecution claimed he had put the CD on sale and had earlier sold pornographic literature on the Internet. 

The student told the court that he did it “for fun and to make a fast buck” and that he did not know that it was against the law to do so since the Internet was full of pornographic sites anyway and he had not heard of anyone taking action against those running them.

The scandal led to some public hand-wringing by notable elders who predictably thought that they had lived in pristine purity in their younger days.

Sociologists talked of the sexually repressed Indian society and the resulting voyeurism. 

Others disagreed, citing how former US president Bill Clinton's affair with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky had been the top story in the sexually liberated US.

Middle and upper income parents came in for sharp criticism for spoiling their children. 

A recent survey by the NGO, Centre of Advocacy and Research, revealed that 75% of parents felt that regulating the behaviour of children should begin at home.

“Once parents take the decision to give their children access to technology, they should take the responsibility for it too.” 

Following the scandal, the DPS and a couple of other schools in Delhi banned the use of cellular phones by their students.

The scandal also caused another NGO to survey the student population in the capital for its sexual awareness and activities. 

It came up with the astounding finding that more than half the student population from the class ninth upwards was sexually active.

The reasons cited for growing promiscuity among students were the role of Internet, foreign TV channels, easy availability of pornographic material and lax parental control, and the absence of moral education in the school syllabi, etc.