When Avendus co-founder's teen daughter conducted a session on cyber-bullying!

At a TiE event on ‘Technology: Its misuse and impact on health and public policy’, entrepreneurs, tech professionals and management school pupils were in attendance to hear a Class 12 student make a spirited presentation on the menace of cyber-bullying. The young girl was Ananya Vohra, daughter of Ranu Vohra, co-founder of financial services firm, Avendus. Ananya’s study on the effects of cyber-bullying among youth in India, showed interesting revelations.

“I conducted a survey with people in the age bracket of 13 to 25, across 11 Indian cities. The total sample size was 132, with the gender balance slightly skewed towards females,” says she. One of the respondents knew someone who contemplated suicide because of cyber-bullying. In another case, a girl was trolled because she posted a picture of herself celebrating a religious ritual.

Only six per cent of the respondents said that they discussed their experience with cyber-bullying with a counsellor or their parents. The solution, says Ananya, is “an in-built algorithm to track equations between individuals (which) will help raise a red flag when cyber-bullying is detected”.