In a district where 60 villages have been formally identified as cybercrime hotspots and nearly one in nine cybercrime cases reported across the country traces back to Nuh, residents of one village have found their own answer to breaking the cycle — by literally breaking their phones.Villagers of Sukhpuri in the Nagina block of Nuh district held a panchayat recently and resolved that not a single resident would use a smartphone henceforth. Once the decision was taken, young men and elders alike picked up stones and smashed 55 mobile handsets on the ground. The video went viral on social media.The resolution was not spontaneous. Nuh police have been running a sustained awareness campaign urging residents to walk away from crime, and Sukhpuri is the first visible result. Police officers, village elders and panchayat members sat together, discussed the future and the phones were the first casualty.Villagers said the smartphone had become the root of the problem — not only the instrument through which fraud was being committed, but an addiction that was tearing families apart. The panchayat declared they would sever all links with the criminal world and switch back to basic keypad handsets.Nuh, part of the Mewat region, has emerged in recent years as what law enforcement agencies describe as India’s most organised cybercrime hub, surpassing even Jharkhand’s Jamtara in scale and operational complexity.Poverty, unemployment and easy access to low-cost smartphones created fertile ground, with criminals renting out open fields with good internet reception to conduct phishing calls without disruption.Typical scams involve impersonating bank officials to extract OTPs, or sextortion, where a video call is recorded, edited with explicit content, and used to blackmail the victim. Sarpanches of flagged villages have been served notices as police seek community cooperation in cracking down on the menace.Youth call move ‘too extreme’Not everyone in Sukhpuri, however, welcomed the diktat with equal enthusiasm. Several youngsters, while acknowledging the cybercrime problem, called the blanket ban an extreme step that would cut them off from the tools of modern life.Students said they relied on smartphones for online classes, study material, scholarship applications and government scheme portals — none of which are accessible on a keypad phone.Others pointed out that UPI payments, job applications and daily navigation had made the smartphone less a luxury than a necessity. Giving it up, they argued, would push the village further behind, not pull it out of trouble.The tension at the heart of Sukhpuri’s experiment is one that Mewat as a whole has struggled to resolve: how to wean a generation off the criminal use of technology without denying it the legitimate benefits of the same. Whether the panchayat’s resolve survives the pressures of daily life — or whether it quietly unravels in the weeks ahead — will determine if this viral moment becomes a replicable model or merely a cautionary tale.