In India section(4) of The Cigarettes and other Tobacco Products Act, 2003 prohibits smoking in public places.  Any violation of this Act is a punishable offence with fine upto Rs200.

Public place as defined in the Act and the rules means any place to which the public has access whether as of right or not and includes all places visited by general public and includes:

*Auditorium
*Hospital Buildings
*Health Institutions
*Amusement Parks
*Restaurants
*Hotels
*Public Offices
*Court Buildings
*Educational Intitutions
*Libraries
*Public Conveyances
*Open Auditorium
*Stadium
*Clubs
*Hookah Bars(where smoking takes place)
*Railway Stations
*Bus stops
*Workplaces
*Shopping Malls
*Cinema Halls
*Refreshment Rooms
*Discotheques
*Coffee Houses
*Pubs
*Bars
*Airport Lounge

But public place does not include open space example parking space, roads, open market places, parks, private homes etc.

To promote tobacco free schools it has been suggested to include ‘Tobacco Control in the Cirriculum at all Levels’.  All educational institutions have beenm directed to display ‘No Smoking Area’ at the entrance

Shachi Saluja
DLDAV Model School
Pitampura
Delhi

The movies-and again,indeed my post is about todays most influential means of Mass Communication-have proved once again,that just how strong their hold over the youth is.

As reported in The Lancent(which was the July 2003 issue) The exposure to smoking in movies was assessed for 3547 adolescents,between  ages 10-14 who had never tried to smoke before.

They studied participants’ exposure to smoking in movies  by asking each student to indicate which films he or she had seen from a unique list of 50 movies. The movies had been previously coded for incidents of smoking.

Of course,no one had realised the powerful effect it had on the children….

2603 children were sucessfully contacted 13-26 months later,to see if they had initiated smoking.[Students who reported any smoking (just a few puffs, one to 100 cigarettes, and more than 100 cigarettes) were classified as having initiated smoking]

THE RESULTS:

Movies,have an iron claw,an upper hand when it comes to what is right and wrong.Adolescents tend to follow blindly withought realising the media is leading them astray.They tend to ruin  their health in order to achieve the “cool”status,as  publicised and glorified by the media.

The mind is like a white cloth,you dip it in red and it changes red,dip it in blue and blue appears,You dip it in tobacco,and we have smoking…..the mind should be dipped in the knowledge that movies can and do often air things that are not right,we as the youth have to take a stand and say no to smoking and tobacco,our voices when raised for the good can influence,not only the ones who knw and love us,but also people who we have never seen or heard before…..

Stop smoking…..

I just came across a lot of statistics while researching and felt like sharing it with all of you…here are a few of them:

Smoking Ban in Bars and Reataurants

After years of booing actors who light up on screen, anti-tobacco activists seem to have found something to cheer about in Aamir Khan’s `Ghajini’. The recently released film is sending out a no-smoking message, earning kudos from long-time crusaders on Saturday.

According to research, 52% of children have their first puff after watching a celebrity light up. Moreover, Union health minister Anbumani Ramadoss had requested Bollywood filmmakers to not show actors smoking on screen.

“We appreciate the efforts of and thank A Murugadoss, the director of `Ghajini’ and Aamir Khan for highlighting such an important issue,” said Dr P C Gupta, director of the Healis-Sekhsaria Institute of Public Health, who has been in the forefront of the campaign to ban smoking in public places.

In the film, the character played by Jiah Khan is walking down the steps of a mall when she spots some men blowing smoke in people’s faces inside the mall. The camera then pans to a `No Smoking’ board before Jiah says, “Yahan smoking allowed nahi hain.”

When contacted, Murugadoss said, “I have never encouraged smoking in my films. If you look at this film, even the negative characters don’t smoke. In fact, the scene in the film that does have smoking is actually against it.” The director added, “Youngsters worship actors and follow them blindly. So I always try to project my actors in a manner that his or her character does not glorify things which are not good.”

Aamir himself said a balance should be struck between discouraging smoking and ensuring artistic freedom. “I fully support the drive to help people to quit smoking and I would strongly advise the youth not to get into this harmful habit in the first place. However, I don’t think a ban on smoking in films makes sense. Films are a creative medium and are meant to reflect different aspects of life, good and bad. Murder is illegal in real life, but we don’t put a ban on it in films. But we should definitely make every effort to discourage smoking in real life.”

Chewing tobacco has been a tradition in India for centuries. Of the total amount of tobacco produced in the country, around 48% is in the form of chewing tobacco, 38% as bidis, and only 14% as cigarettes. Thus, bidis, snuff and chewing tobacco (such as gutka, khaini and zarda) form the bulk (86%) of India’s total tobacco production. In the rest of the world, production of cigarettes is 90% of total production of tobacco related products.

The per capita consumption of cigarettes in India is merely a tenth of the world average. This unique tobacco consumption pattern is a combination of tradition and more importantly the tax imposed on cigarettes over the last 2 decades. Cigarette smokers pay almost 85% of the total tax revenues generated from tobacco.

The Indian tobacco industry

India is the second largest producer of tobacco in the world after China. It produced 572 m kgs of tobacco in FY03. However, India holds a meager 0.7% share of the US$ 30 bn global trade in tobacco, with cigarettes accounting for 85% of the country’s total tobacco exports.

Despite being the second largest producer, India is only the ninth largest exporter of tobacco and tobacco products in the world. Out of the total tobacco produced in India, only one-third is flue-cured tobacco suitable for cigarette manufacturing. Most of the tobacco produce is suitable for the manufacture of chewing tobacco, bidis and other cheap tobacco products, which have no demand outside the country. In India, three major cigarette players dominate the market, primarily ITC with 72% market share, Godfrey Phillips with 12% and VST with 8% share of the market.

There has been a lot of talk in recent years about whether advertising really influences people to smoke. As regards the ban on smoking in movies, the argument for creative expression has found favour in many circles. Given India’s twin obsessions of cricket and cinema, there can be no argument in favour of allowing smoking in movies.
Munish points out that Indian films have a global impact on audiences; their influence extends to South Asia, even to South East Asia. Study after study has clearly shown that young people are influenced by seeing their favourite stars smoke on screen. The Centre for Global Health Research study also shows a strong connection between exposure and receptivity to tobacco advertising and promotion and tobacco use among young people in India.

The powerful tobacco industry in India has muscled its way out of any move to curtail consumption. Covert advertising and lifestyle brands have replaced the earlier more visible forms of tobacco advertising that were banned in 2004.

NGOs working in this area also point to the political clout of cash-rich tobacco companies. Even our health minister’s commendable efforts to put repulsive and frightening pictures on cigarette packs (notified last year) has been postponed a number of times. Dr Upendra Bhojani, faculty, Institute of Public Health, Bangalore, says that while the pictures initially decided on were those of a dead baby and a cancerous lung, they have been modified to those of a scorpion!

Civil society groups are now actively pursuing recognition of tobacco consumption as a public health issue. Meanwhile, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced a joint commitment in July 2008 to invest $ 500 million towards anti-smoking efforts in developing countries like India and China.

Exposure to smoking in movies has been linked with adolescent smoking initiation in some studies. Smoking depicted in movies is a major and growing public-health problem. Concern over smoking in movies led WHO to make ‘Smoke Free Film’ a theme of 2003 World No Tobacco Day. A recent research undertook a study to ascertain whether exposure to smoking in movies predicts smoking initiation.

Researchers from the U. S. assessed exposure to smoking shown in movies in 3547 adolescents, aged 10-14 years, who reported in a baseline survey that they had never tried smoking. Exposure to smoking in movies was estimated for individual respondents on the basis of the number of smoking occurrences viewed in unique samples of 50 movies, which were randomly selected from a larger sample pool of popular contemporary movies. They then successfully re-contacted 2603 (73%) students 13-26 months later for a follow-up interview to determine whether they had initiated smoking.

It was found that overall, 10% of the students initiated smoking during the follow-up period. In the group where there was highest exposure to movie smoking, 17% (107) of students had initiated smoking, compared with only 3% (22) in the group least exposed to movie smoking. After controlling for baseline characteristics, adolescents in the group of highest exposure to movie smoking were 2·7 times more likely to initiate smoking compared with those in the lowest quartile. The effect of exposure to movie smoking was stronger in adolescents with non-smoking parents than in those whose parent smoked. In this study, 52·2% of smoking initiation can be attributed to exposure to smoking in movies.

The results provide strong evidence that viewing smoking in movies promotes smoking initiation among adolescents.

consumptions of tobacco and Tobacco Products is an integral part of  Indian Traditions and Customs. It is a problem that needs to be tackled seriously, And so I , Nimit jain want to draw your attention to a f ew of these traditions.( Please leave some suggestions on How to tackle the Problem as comments for the post.)

The Ruling class, and upper classes give Paan (a form of tobacco) to guests .

Hukka, beedi, tambaku etc. are being consumed since early times.

Smoking of cigars is taken as a SYMBOL OF POWER.

Hello again. Now I will post about the industry estrategies in Brazil and our efforts to face it. Brazil has 183,987,291 inhabitants (IBGE, 2007), and presents an enormous young population - 51.1 million people aged between 15 and 29 years, which corresponds to 27.4% of the total population (IBGE, 2006). Considering this significant part of young people with own source of income, the tobacco industry has permanently invested in marketing and political strategies to conquer them: the 6th cheapest cigarettes of the world; the great smuggled cigarette availability; the diversity of sale’s points, where the marketing is still permitted and the social and environment corporative responsibility like Cultural and Environment Dialogues and the University Dialogues are examples. These ones happens in partnership with universities and students’ representative entities, bringing to the university public free lectures with sports celebrities, intellectuals and so on that are usually well known personalities, with great credibility among the youth segment. Since its creation in 2005, they already had been in universities of all the five regions of Brazil, reaching more than 23,000 young and constructing strong bonds with the students’ management companies. The conquest of an ample students’ social acceptance is expressed in the evaluation they have made, available in the company’s site: 97% had evaluated the Program as good or very good and 99% had considered the discussed subjects as interesting or very interesting. These all explain how still 3.7% of the Brazilian population between 12 and 17 years are smokers. This percentage grows for 16% considering the population between 18 and 24 years. These strategies shock with the National Tobacco Control Program, that has been facing Industry since the decade of 1980, having as one of its more significant conquests the total smoking products advertising ban in the television, Internet, and others, besides the sports, artistic and cultural events sponsorship’s banishment, through Federal Law nº10.167/00. This important conquers has been a cause of litigation for the Industry, having Souza Cruz petitioned against the federal law with an Unconstitutionality Direct Action (ADIN) to cancel the ban. The National Cancer Institute - INCA, an office of the Health Ministery, where the National coordination is located, has already subsidized the Federal Government that has already gone to justice with a contrary legal action. The same has done the Brasilian Alliance for Tobacco Control - ACTBr, that represents the social control of the tobacco control policy in Brazil. To face this offensive we need to extend social mobilization to maintain the advertising prohibition and also to extend it to 100% of prohibiton, that is also in the points of sale. We need also to foment a critical attitude by the youngsters collectively building up strategies for the creation of a National Young Net for Tobacco Control in Brazil linked with LA RED – “Latinoamerica Respira Diferente” (THE NET) that is a net of youth for advocacy to tobacco control, composed of 50 youngsters of 06 Latin American countries - Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Uruguay, that assumed the role of national leaderships to trace action in their nations. Currently Brazil is represented only by a technician assessor of our Coordination,that is Evandro. For its democratic, equality, multiplying and participative nature, the social networks are presented as the most adequate channels to improve the youthful enrollment. The possibility of creation of young net for tobacco control from the human and social capital preexisting in the youth movements and organizations opens new possibilities and would set fire a significant social and political pressure to deep the restrictions to the industry. We are sure this meeting will certainly promote this. Thats all for now. Hope to see you soon. Evandro Alves and Maristela Menezes. Recife/PE/Brazil.

Hello all! I am Evandro Alves Barbosa Filho, from Recife city, in Pernambuco state, northeast Brazil. I am very happy in had been invited to participate in this terrific Conference! I can´t wait to meet you all soon and can be able to share experiences and plan an agenda for youth advocacy around the world. As were asked, I am publishing my profile in tobacco control advocacy and awareness. Recife is a city with more than 1,5 million of inhabitants situated in northeast Brazil. I have being working with health promotion trough a continuous health education process towards the creation and implementation of Smoke - Free Workplaces; civil society mobilization towards disclosure of the tobacco industry’s strategies; elaboration of projects, scientific papers to national and international conferences in Tobacco Control and Social Work field and educative material in the Recife’s Tobacco Control Policy Coordination of the Health Secretariat. I also have been interviewed by local media. Actually, I am working in order to improve social control for this policy involving the Municipal Health Council and organized civil society. We developed in October of 2008 a formation cycle for the Council members that had as objective to strengthen the tobacco control actions in the city, through social oversight; to promote ethical, social, political, economic and cultural formation about the tobacco control issue and to stimulate tobacco control advocacy. I am also working to implement the Latin America Youth Net – LA RED, in which I represent Brazil, by starting from my city, first establishing partnership with the Universities’ Student’s Movement. Also I intend to improve the Recife’s Social Civil Mobilization Forum.