India’s Tobacco-Free Village

Villages, districts and an entire state have been declared “tobacco-free” in the last two months as part of a drive to eradicate tobacco use in India. Campaigns funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in Andhra Pradesh and Gujarat have stopped the sale of tobacco in some villages and begun imposing heavy fines for smoking or chewing the product. Himachal Pradesh was the first state to be pronounced smoke-free by its chief minister in May, while the government in Haryana has just declared the state is the first to go “hookah bar free” after shutting down more than 60 bars offering hookah, or waterpipes, with nicotine.

 But one village in Haryana is way ahead of them, having eschewed tobacco for decades because of local custom and belief. Shankapura has no paan stains on its buildings and there’s not a cigarette butt in sight. “There are no cigarettes,” says local shopkeeper Bhajan Lal Selwal, his straight shiny teeth a testament to a life-long rejection of tobacco. Mr. Lal Selwal says he and his neighbors have never smoked cigarettes or tasted paan, the chewable tobacco favored by about 20% of Indian tobacco users according to the Global Adult Tobacco Survey carried out by the World Health Organization. The small silvery packets hanging on the shop wall behind him contain hair-dye and soap powder rather than addictive paan masala sold in stores like his across the country.

 Mr. Lal Selwal doesn’t think he loses out financially by not selling tobacco products and believes that he has saved his own health and protected his wallet by not smoking. “Consuming tobacco destroys health and one ends up spending a lot of money to cure the diseases,” he says. The village residents differ about when and why Shankapura became tobacco-free. Suresh Selwal, a 40-year-old lecturer in political science at Kurukshetra University in Haryana, says the non-smoking tradition began in his village during partition in 1947. “In the struggle between Hindus and Muslims in 1947, the founder of our Selwal sub-caste was being chased by Muslims and to protect himself he hid in a tobacco plant,” Mr. Selwal says.

“Since then he promised the tobacco plant: ‘Our caste will protect you like you protected me.’ So no one is using tobacco.” However, the oldest member of the village, Ram Lamba, who says he is 101 and has lived in Shankapura for 90 years, claims the tobacco prohibition began at least as far back as his grandfather’s generation. “Since then no one has been smoking and when you don’t see smoking in your family you don’t do it,” says the centenarian, who claims he and his 84-year-old wife have no health problems. The village is predominantly Sikh, another reason cited by those living there for its tobacco free status.

The tenth Sikh Guru, Gobind Singh, forbade smoking and according to Sikh history once told a farmer that he would not bless him unless he stopped growing tobacco. According to the story, the farmer ripped up his tobacco crop and began to grow wheat instead. Paradoxically Shankapura is in one of the top three tobacco-growing states in India. Haryana along with Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka accounted for 84% of the total land area used for growing tobacco in 2008-2009, when India produced 620 million kilograms of the cash crop, according to a report published by the Department of Agriculture and Cooperation.