Just How Inactive Are India’s Teenagers In This Age Of Technology And Gadgets?

There was a time where parks in residential colonies were full of the garrulous, energetic and hyperactive children’s voices. Parents’ main complaint then wasn’t that youngsters hardly played or ventured out of their homes; but that they often played hide and seek with their books and subjects of academia. There were days when there was a genuine burst of energy of many youngsters who thronged to streets, parks, gardens in an incessant craving for sports and games.

In fact, one even saw hundreds and hundreds of teenagers make a cricket pitch out of something as random or concrete out of the driveway of a house. But what has happened to India’s teenagers now? To say that India’s teenagers are inactive would be putting it mildly.

The fact is that India’s teenagers are highly inactive and in an age where one has seen an overload of websites, the world wide web with its magnetic pull of social media sites, it could be said that parks and cricket grounds or football fields have switched places with the smartphone screens.

But while we knew that India’s teenagers are inactive what makes the present concern a bit of a desperate situation especially from the parental concern or point of view is to note just what percentage of India’s teenagers are inactive.

Apparently, the worrying sign can be well understood from a recent study conducted at a Pan-India level. It said that around 74 per cent of India’s teenagers are inactive.

The renowned World Health Organization(or the WHO, as they say) stated bigger concerns, truth be told in a telling perspective. It shared, around eight in every ten teenagers are not physically active as they should be.

In its report, the WHO submitted that around 73.9% of Indian teenagers are inactive, thereby raising the alarming concern that something ought to be done about such a disparaging current state of inactivity.

The findings were published in the “Lancet Child and Adolescent Health” medical journal on Friday.

In addition to the above, there were some insights shared on the findings by Dr. Shashank Joshi, from Mumbai’s Lilavati Hospital who echoed the country’s concern, it could be said, when he shared that “it proves that what we have feared for some time now that game time in playgrounds has been replaced by gaming by today’s generations.”

But a crucial observation made by the study- the first-ever global trend for adolescent insufficient study- highlighted that there’s a welcoming respite in terms of India’s teenagers who fare slightly better than the rest of the world’s highly inactive teenage population. The reason, it was believed, was credited to the average Indian boy’s obsession with cricket.

Cricket, as the report went on to highlight, was “frequently played unstructured in local communities.”

But Dr. Joshi also alerted readers against drawing misconceptions, saying that the country’s reasonably better percentage vis-a-vis the world in terms of being physically inactive shouldn’t provide relief to the nation. And that the Indian teenagers are inactive should still concern all.

However, that said, there were also some experts who suggested that where the recent WHO finding lacked was addressing the huge rural-urban divide, labelling the findings as tad bit ‘generalised.’

That said, no matter how individual discretion differs in this regard, something ought to be done to encourage the culture of playing out or simply being active!