| cutting and paste |
Posted
on 06-Feb-01 01:14 PM
As the students of Navjivan Higher Secondary School, Ahmedabad raise this slogan after their visit to the Hall of Horrors exhibition, Bhagirath, lying in the
adjacent hospice, mulls over his fate. As a terminally ill lung cancer patient he is already reduced to be a living skeleton. His speech is deteriorating fast.
Yet, he is keen to make his point. "I used to smoke bidis, Sir. Then doctors told me I had got cancer. I had no idea what it was and I had no idea that bidis
could cause this dreadful disease Sir."
Great stuff, heart-rending sound bites for my radio listeners. As his words sink into his tears, I couldn't exploit his grief any longer. He is a dying man.
His dignity must be respected.
Bhagirath had no education and was totally unaware of the horrifying consequences of smoking. That is the tragedy of the majority of India's bidi smokers, who
are likely to be poorer and less educated compared to cigarette smokers. A few years ago, a study in Chennai found that smoking is more common among the less
educated. Smoking prreviewence among illiterate was 64 %. It was 58 % among those who had attended school for six years and just 21 % among those who had gone
to school for 12 years or more.
The powerful bidi lobby is closer to government than the cigarette lobby. Some of the influential MPs have large stakes in the bidi industry. They have been
able to convince the government that high taxation on bidi will lead to a lot of unemployment among the rural poor. Excise duty on bidi has remained
significantly lower than cigarettes. And lower price means more smokers. In fact, as cigarette becomes unaffordable due to high taxation; millions of smokers
are turning on bidis.
According to an estimate more than 137 million people smoke bidis in India and nearly 55 % of the total tobacco produced is used to make bidis. Ten times more
bidis are sold in India than cigarettes. Gujarat is one the biggest producers of bidi tobacco. It is cultivated on 75 % of the farming land in the Anand
district. It has brought prosperity to local farmers such as Mahendra P Patel, who smokes 75 bidis a day. "Bidi hasn't done any harm to me", he argues, "If our
farmers were not producing tobacco many of them would have died of hunger." Surely, Mahendra Bhai is not aware of recent figures of the Gujarat Cancer Research
Society. More than half of the people in Gujarat's four major tobacco-growing districts - Kheda, Anand, Bharoch and Banaskantha-are addicted to bidis.
My next stop was Parmanand ki Chali, a poor locality of about 600 families in Ahmedabad, where groups of women are busily hand-rolling bidis. The smartest
among them, Prabha Devi, comes forward to volunteer some information. She is able to roll about 1,500 bidis a day; that brings her a small income of Rs. 35. G
K Prabhu, the marketing manager of Ganesh Bidi in Mysore, argues that government restrictions on bidi might wreck havoc on poor communities of bidi makers and
would result in the loss of millions of jobs. But what about bidis wrecking havoc on the millions of families of bidi addicts.
Far away in Chithera, a village in western Utter Pradesh, Sumarti knows all about the bidi addiction. She started smoking ten years ago on the recommendation
of a local doctor, perhaps a quack. "I used to feel dull and have headaches, so the doctor advised me to smoke bidi." Don't you want to quit? Rather annoyed,
she says, "Every women who works in the fields smokes and if you want me to quit tell me the medicine." I do not have that medicine. In fact, nobody does. If
there had been a medicine, why would bidis be claiming young addicts in the world's most advanced nation, the United States?
In August 1999, the Washington Post published an alarming report about the new craze of bidis among school children. Imported from India, they cost $1.50 to
$3.50 and to mute the noxious elements of raw tobacco they are sold in candy-store flavours, such as cinnamon, mango, orange, chocolate, vanilla, raspberry and
menthol. Last year Chicago became the first city to ban the sale of bidis and was soon followed by Illinois, where violators could be fined $100 to $1,000. A
survey in San Francisco last year found 58% of students at four high schools had tried them.
The research studies in the US have shown that bidis deliver greater amounts of nicotine, tar and carbon monoxide than standard cigarettes. A recent analysis,
released in August 1999 by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), found that 11 out of 12 brands of bidis analysed contained higher concentrates of
nicotine than the unfiltered cigarette, American Spirit. These tests also found that the average nicotine concentration in bidis was about 28 % higher than
found American Spirit.
The American researchers have punctured the myth, still prreviewent in India, that bidis are less harmful than cigarettes. This false impression is based on
arguments that a bidi contains only 250 mg. of tobacco, roughly one fourth of a cigarette, that it is wrapped in natural leaf, which is less harmful than the
paper in a cigarette. "The Tendu leaf produces more smoke than the paper in the cigarette and the smoker has to puff harder and quicker to keep the bidi
burning and that causes more damage to smokers than a cigarette," says Prof. M Siddiqi, the Director of Chittaranjan National Cancer Institute.
With no disrespect to anti-Wills campaigners, it is easer to slam the big enemy, a multi-national cigarette company and the cricket establishment. If India has
to wage war against the epidemic of smoking, the real battle must take place against the bidi.
|
| Biswo |
Posted
on 06-Feb-01 10:42 PM
Several years ago,there was a benign old person living near
Tandi,who was migrated from Burma after Ne Win's xenophobic regime
targetted Nepalese there. He himself was impotent, so he loved
children very much. He used to bring candies whenever he came to
our house also. But he was often a sick person,and was largely
tended by his wife. Since his body was wearing away day by day,
villagers thought he was suffering from tuberculosis. He
witnessed his own entropy and slowly died after a few years.
I remember a lot of such unprognosticated death occuring in
neighboring areas in my childhood. and then , a few years ago,
BPKoirala Memorial Cancer Hospital was built in Chitwan, served
by competent doctors from Shizhuazhuan Medical Center,China
alternatively. And suddenly, a lot of people with similar disease
were confirmed to be suffering from Cancer.A major cause for
all those illness is carciogenic input:cigarette,bidi and others
nonsalubrious products.
Since Bidi and Cigarette slowly enter the body,and belatedly
manifest itself in the host organ,quite a few people seem to
believe they are immune to the supposedly carciogenic effects of
the products. Cash strapped medical centers of Nepal were always
slow to counter the belligerent advertise campaign of cigarette
company. A lot of Doctors and teachers themselves puff cigarette, making it difficult to convince the patients and
students the case for quitting the cigarette.Tobacco lobby is
always more strident and formiddable than the ragtag council of
anti-tobacco activists. In our country,there is already dearth of
social activists,and those who are there in the field are more or
less enchanted by flamboyant protests for obvious issues
(environment,child labor etc). So ,the obvious truism is that
Surya Tobacco is one of the most revenue churning organizations,
and though Janakpur Churot is in morbid condition, it is of course
more because of socialist majdoor organizations and corrupt
management.In this overall appalling scenario,the onus of
disseminating such anti-Bidi news lies more or less in the
acadamic gurus and medical doctors/professional.
|
