With train services resuming, runaway kids head for Mumbai

I'm here to kill Salman Khan because he murdered Sushant Singh Rajput. That's what a 16-year-old boy told officials at a local children's home a few months ago when asked why he had fled his home in UP.

- Sharmila.Ganesan

What followed were five routine counseling sessions during one of which he threatened to kill the officials for catching me. On connecting with his friends through social media, the officials traced the aggressive teen's family in UP who came down to fetch him. When we advised them to seek professional therapy for him, they told us he had been addicted to PUBG, a multiplayer game that was banned in India last year, says a child welfare officer, who has seen the mobile game's legitimate variants fuel the kind of truancy that's threatening to make up for the recent lockdown-induced dip in the number of missing children admitted in the child care institution he heads. Many kids had taken loans to play the mobile games and ran away fearing their family's reactions on discovering the debt, he says.