Government’s Chief Economic Adviser V Anantha Nageswaran on Thursday backed age-based curbs on social media use for children, calling compulsive scrolling a “silent scourge”.Supporting moves by Andhra Pradesh and Goa to consider bans on social media use for children below 16 — along the lines of Australia — Nageswaran said “compulsive scrolling and social comparison are linked to anxiety and depressive symptoms”.In other key remarks, he flagged obesity as a threat to India’s demographic dividend and urged private industry to adopt clearer food-labelling practices. “The private sector can allow food labelling to reflect the risks of what people are consuming. There is scope for improvement in India on food labelling. Governments alone cannot address this. It requires citizen consciousness and private participation,” the CEA said after the Economic Survey 2025-26 raised concerns over obesity and digital addiction. The survey said platforms should be made responsible for enforcing age verification and age-appropriate defaults, particularly for social media, and backed the Online Gaming (Regulation) Act, 2025, as a major step to address digital addiction and financial harm among youth.The law bans online money games involving wagering, restricts advertising and introduces a licensing framework for permissible skill-based games to curb compulsive use, debt and related mental health concerns. “Compulsive scrolling and social comparison are linked to social anxiety and depressive symptoms. Exposure to screen time, sedentary lifestyles and ultra-processed food consumption increase the risk of anxiety and suicidal thoughts significantly among our adolescents and early working-age population. This is a silent scourge and we need to fix that if we are going to achieve our long-term growth aspirations,” Nageswaran said.WHAT AP, GOA ARE DOINGAndhra Pradesh HRD Minister Nara Lokesh recently revealed the state government is mulling a ban on access to social media for children below 16 years. Goa IT Minister Rohan Khaunte also said the government is studying the possibility of introducing a ban on social media use for children below the age of 16, citing growing concerns over the impact of excessive screen time on children.The report also recommends “digital diets” involving voluntary device-free periods for adults and cites Karnataka’s ‘Digital Detox Centre – Beyond Screens’ experiment.On obesity, it noted that India’s ultra-processed food market grew by more than 150 per cent between 2009 and 2023. Retail sales surged from $0.9 billion in 2006 to nearly $38 billion in 2019 — a 40-fold rise.The 2019-21 National Family Health Survey shows 24 per cent of Indian women and 23 per cent of Indian men are overweight or obese. Estimates suggest over 3.3 crore children were obese in 2020, projected to rise to 8.3 crore by 2035.The survey suggested school-level interventions such as improving water access, providing free fruits, offering only healthy options in cafeterias and removing vending machines to promote healthier diets.Need for skill-based educationThe survey has cautioned that secondary age-specific net enrolment (NER) remains low at 52.2%, highlighting the need to retain students beyond Grade 8It has suggested embedding structured skilling pathways in secondary schools to make education more relevant and arrest the high dropout rates