As the year draws its end, in order to bid farewell, outings or get together are a common trend among the youngsters. Here in Odisha, such incident turned into a misadventure when a student has to loss his life after slipping into a waterfall while taking a selfie along with his friends at Bhimkund, a popular picnic spot in Odisha’s Mayurbhanj district.The victim, who has been identified as Rohan Mishra, a student of Madhupatna Sai Sikhshya Kendra, Cuttack.
A video of the bizarre incident shows the victim being swept away by the turbulent waters and is struggling to stay afloat. And people around could be seen rushing towards the edge of the waterfall to help and save the man. A police case has been registered after the incident.
In a similar prospective earlier this year, three Bengaluru students had to face the same life-ending situation while taking a selfie at a lake near Sidhheshwara shrine. The students were – Muhammad Mumtaz, Shankar and Poorna Chandra from Siddaganga Pre-University College. They were visiting the shrine as part of a National Service Scheme (NSS) camp in October.
The craze among youngsters to take a perfect selfie has led to an alarming number of deaths in India, which can better be named as death-by-selfie.
This is really unfortunate that just to click a perfect selfie to share on social media, people have been crashing cars, getting hit by trains and even falling off cliffs. And the increasing number of accidents and deaths are now enabled the government to intervene.
As per a survey conducted by All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in Delhi, more than 250 people had to go through this selfie death in the past six years. According to the study, India is at high in reporting the maximum number of selfie deaths in world.
The study’s lead author, Agam Bansal said that selfie deaths are becoming a major public health problem. He noted that taking a simple selfie is not life threatening. However, it is deadly when people take risks while trying to get that picture perfect.
The Tourism ministry of India in order to control the mishaps asks the state governments and Union Territory administrations to come up with warning signs at the unsafe tourist spots. Additionally the guides and guards deployed at all the sites, are to be trained to handle such incidents, whether they come under the Ministry of Tourism or the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI).
“There will be emergency medical arrangements in order to assist at all Selfie Danger Zones too,” as said by an official.
Besides these, the Ministry of Tourism has also thought of installing CCTV cameras to keep an eye on tourists at such unsafe spots.
Some of the states in India such as Andhra Pradesh, Goa, Kerala and Maharashtra have already deployed tourist police teams at several tourist hotspots to have a control and there by avoiding such untowards.
