Malda, Nov. 5: A 13-year-old boy in a Malda village took his own life for not getting a cellphone that his father had promised him.

Gopal Sarkar, a Class VII student of Dalna High School, committed suicide by hanging from a wooden beam of his house at Dalna, about 35km from here, yesterday evening.

Gopal had been asking for a handset after some of his classmates had been gifted mobile phones by their parents. The boy’s father, Kamal Sarkar, is a middle-class farmer and on Tuesday, he had promised to buy a handset for his son the next day. “We have come to know that the father had said he would buy one for him on Wednesday and when he returned home empty-handed, the boy hanged himself,” an investigating officer said.

Police sources said Gopal was the eldest of three brothers and a sister. The boy refused to go to school yesterday after his father had told him that he would not be able to buy him the handset.

Malda police superintendent Bhuban Mondol said the Habibpur police were treating the case as suicide and the body had been sent for post-mortem. “It is very unfortunate that such a young boy could end his life for a mobile phone,” said Mondol.

Kamal told the police that his son had been pestering him for a handset in the past week, saying his friends were flaunting their cellphones at the school.

“I had told him to wait as I had some more paddy to sell. Gopal had said he wanted a Chinese handset that was cheap and he would not make calls, but only listen to radio. However, he could not wait for a little while longer and killed himself,” the father told the Habibpur police.

Swapan Roy, a psychiatrist here, said one could not blame parents for such incidents. “Immature minds are easily swayed by the need of things others proudly display and develop an obsession for them. With exposure to television and advertisements, young children are easily lured to coveting such things. When such a young person commits suicide, he does not think of the consequences at all,” Roy said.

He added that schools should not permit mobile phones and wondered why some institutions still allowed their use on campus.