Less harm in desi puff

Tar and nicotine levels in Indian cigarettes have dropped: Study

BANGALORE: Tar and nicotine levels in Indian cigarettes have dropped by about 10 per cent in the last one year, though cigarettes still remain hugely harmful. While the habit of cigarette-smoking is not on the rise in India, more and more Indians are taking to higher nicotine-tar products like bidis and chewing tobacco.

Nicotine and tar are ingrained in the tobacco leaf and their levels have been reduced with better practices of cultivation and use of inorganic fertilisers, Dr V Krishna Murthy, the director of Central Tobacco Research Institute (CTRI), a unit of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research at Rajahmundry in Andhra Pradesh, told DNA. He said the average tar content in a 66-mm long cigarette is down to 16 mg from 17 to 24 mg a year ago and nicotine has been lowered to about 1.5 mg from 2 mg in the same period.

Growing tobacco in lighter soils instead of heavier soils that lead to higher tar content, harvesting the leaves at a ripe stage and removing flower heads of plants have also helped, a senior scientist of the ITC said. ITC is India's largest cigarette maker with a market share of some 72 per cent with popular brands like Wills Navy Cut and Gold Flake.

In a regular size filter cigarette of 69 mm length the tar content now ranges between 15 and 17 mg and nicotine between one and 1.4 mg, said Nita Kapoor, Senior Vice-President of Godfrey Phillips, India's second largest cigarette company whose brands include Four Square. “A ten per cent reduction has happened in the last one year and efforts are on to reduce the levels further,'' she added.

Cigarettes made abroad come with a wide range of nicotine-tar levels, some with less and some with more than Indian cigarettes. Indian companies are unwilling to disclose these proportions in their individual brands.

But will Indian firms publicise the tar-nicotine amounts on the cigarette packs like their western counterparts? While ITC chose not to reply, Kapoor said, “We are ready and will be guided by legislation.'' India, like many Western countries, is still to reach the European Union standards of 10-mg tar and one-mg nicotine. "We are still continuing to reduce our levels,'' Murthy said.

Philip Morris, the world's largest cigarette company that makes Marlboro and other brands, however, warns smokers not to be carried away by low tar-nicotine levels or classification of cigarettes as 'light' or 'mild'.

“The amount of tar and nicotine inhaled will be higher if, for example, a smoker blocks ventilation holes (in some filters), inhales more deeply, takes more puffs or smokes more cigarettes,'' says the company.

Murthy points out that the proportion of seven deadly cancer-causing chemicals in tobacco, known as tobacco specific nitrosamines or TSNAs, averaging at 1.5 ppm (parts per million) in Indian cigarettes, is among the lowest in the world.

Cigarette smoking in India has also been stagnant at about 90 billion cigarettes per year for many years.  Though India is the second largest tobacco producer after China and the largest market for cigarettes, the per capita smoking in India is the lowest at 119 cigarettes, against 1,790 in China and 2,193 in the US.

But this is nothing to cheer about. Consumption of tobacco has been slowly shifting to higher nicotine-tar products like bidis and chewing tobaccos. The share of cigarettes in the total tobacco consumption in India has declined from 23 per cent in 1971 to about 14 now.