India: The arrest at the weekend of a teenage student of an elite New Delhi school, for transmitting a video clip featuring him having oral sex with a fellow student, has shocked a highly conservative society, where even couples holding hands in public is frowned upon and discouraged.
The 17-year-old's detention follows the arrest of the head of a popular Indian online auction site, Baazee.com, owned by US giant EBay, under the Indian Information Technology Act that bans the transmission and sale of pornographic material.
Police have also arrested an engineering student from one of the country's top technical institutions at Kanpur for allegedly uploading the explicit video featuring the two teenagers having sexual intercourse at the school.
The circulation of the explicit images has sparked concern among parents and educators about the increasing use of mobile camera phones by students in schools across urban India.
India is the world's fastest growing market for mobile phones, with the current 45 million users set to double within a year.
Teenager promiscuity has also dominated the media, placing the onus for looser sexual mores among teenagers on indifferent parenting and unconcerned teachers.
Underlying this debate, however, is the hypocrisy and double standards that surrounds sex here. Sexual attitudes across India remain Victorian, with a majority considering sex to be sinful, dirty and even unhealthy.
Consequently, a large number of Indians, mainly young men, are preoccupied with sex, their frustrations heightened by a lack of access to girls who were kept cloistered by their parents with the single aim of getting them married. Marriage is still the single-minded objective of most Indian women, especially in rural areas where the majority of Indians live.
"Indian men have sex on their minds and fear in their hearts," a behavioural scientist says. They are obsessed by it, but have no outlet and so avail of prostitutes, he added.
According to a recent survey by the magazine Outlook, 55 per cent of Indians had their first sexual experience after marriage. While 46 per cent of men were virgins at the time of wedlock, the corresponding figure for women was 72 per cent, according to the responses from 15,324 people from 15 states that were recorded between 1988 and 2003.
The survey also revealed extra-marital sex had risen 3.3 times for men in 15 years. For women the increase was 14-fold.
According to an earlier survey by Outlook, rich housewives often hire men by discreetly placed adverts in newspapers and magazines for an afternoon of sexual pleasure. Alternatively, they pick up strangers in public places and watch hard core pornographic films in groups.
The report supported by social scientists declared that Indian women normally associated with conservatism and prudery were steadily outgrowing that image by indulging in sexual peccadilloes.