In Delhi
IT PROFESSIONAL Siddarth Gigoo, 35, gasped for breadth as he ran to catch the train at New Delhi’s Rajiv Chowk Metro rail station. Seeing him panting, another young man asked him if he needed help.
“That’s when I decided to quit smoking,” the former chain smoker, who had been smoking from his college days, said nearly six months after that day.
“Today, I feel better, healthier. I go to the gym every morning without fail,” he said.
He says he regrets having subjected his five-year-old daughter Amiya and wife Aishwarya passive smokers all those years.
Mr Gigoo is an exception to the rule. As the popular saying goes smokers give up smoking many times. New Year resolutions to kick the habit perhaps have the shortest tenure.
Experts say tobacco addiction is very difficult to give up. With an estimated 120 million smokers in the country and their number going up all the time, the Indian government now plans to increase to 100 the number of “tobacco cessation clinics” across the country to help the smokers to give up the cancerous habit.
The clinics, which will be manned by a clinical psychologist and a counsellor, will help chain smokers to give up the habit through counselling and meditation, besides putting them on “nicotine replacement therapy.”
The federal health ministry also plans to make it mandatory for the 275 medical colleges in the country and 600 district hospitals to set up similar clinics.
“In the next two years, India will have an additional 1,000 tobacco cessation clinics,” Health Minister Anbumani Ramadoss was quoted as saying in The Times of India. “These clinics will run a 4-6 week cessation and counselling programme for early and chain smokers.”
The first such clinic was set up in the national capital in 2002 under collaboration between the government and World Health Organisation and there all altogether 18 such clinics spread over 17 states now.
Though some 40,000 smokers had visited the clinics, the quit rate of 15-30 percent, though higher than the abysmal national average of 2 percent, is still very low. Health Minister Ramadoss, a passionate anti-smoking campaigner, has now announced a ban on smoking in public places, including bars and restaurants, from October 2, the birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi.
The health ministry announced that those caught smoking in “public places” after that date would be fined Rs. 200 under the ‘Prohibition of smoking in Public Places Rules, 2008.’ The rules ban tobacco consumption in all government and private buildings, including cafes, restaurants, schools, pubs, discotheques, stadia, airports, hospitals and bus stands. However, parks and roads don’t come under the definition of public places.
Mr Ramadoss said the fine would be increased to Rs. 1,000 in future. Organisations which allow employees to smoke with in their premises would have to pay Rs. 5,000 per employee caught smoking.
Owners of cafes, restaurants and pubs fear the government order would result in a slump in customers.
“We will lose customers if we don’t let them smoke,” an owner said.
Mr Ramadoss’ efforts to have a ban on smoking on screen have found few supporters. According to him, the movies encouraged smoking and “52 percent of children have their first puff of a cigarette because of movie celebrities.'
Bollywood’s reigning star Shah Rukh Khan, a chain smoker, rejected the minister’s personal appeal to him not to smoke in the movies.
"I think there is a huge amount of creative freedom and in the field of art and cinema we should be allowed that. One should not go around picking on little things - because that's just cinema, its make believe and we should not have huge censorship on that," Mr. Khan said.
"I wish Ramadoss prays that I stop smoking in real life because that's worse. In movies, we just do it for make-believe."
India is the second largest producer of tobacco in the world after China and the ninth largest exporter of cigarette and other tobacco products. Despite its stated plans to ban smoking, government rules allow 100 per cent foreign direct investment in cigarette-manufacturing.
Indian Tobacco Company, formerly The Imperial Tobacco Company, is one of the biggest exporter of tobacco products in the country.
Ban or no ban, however, many in India will still want to light up their lives daily with a pack. Or two.