One million people in India will die from tobacco-related illnesses every year in the next decade, a new study revealed Thursday.

According to the research conducted by a team of doctors and scientists from India, Canada and Britain, one in five of male deaths and one in 20 of all female deaths between the ages of 30 and 69 will be caused by smoking.

“The results we found surprised us, because smokers in India start later in life and smoke fewer cigarettes or ‘bidis’ than those in Europe or America, but the risks are as extreme as in the West,” Prabhat Jha of the Center for Global Health Research at the University of Toronto, lead author of the study said quoted by the Associated Press.

Bidi is a locally made product comprising tobacco rolled in the leaf of another plant. The study found that regular smoking of cigarettes was more harmful than regular smoking of bidis. The researchers have calculated that on average, men who smoke bidi lose about six years of life.

The researchers explained that Indians are more likely predisposed to dying, unlike people from Western country, because many people here are infected with asymptomatic tuberculosis. Smoking can cause enough damage to the lungs that the latent infection can no longer be contained, researchers said.

The results are based on a survey of deaths among a sample of 1.1 million homes in all parts of India carried out by about 900 field workers.

Around 120 million people smoke in India, most of them men, according to the study.

The researchers also found that more than 50 percent of smoking deaths are likely to be among poor, illiterate Indians, suggesting that pictorial health warnings on packages, instead of the current written warnings, may be part of an effective anti-smoking strategy. Raising taxes on bidi could also help, Dr. Jha said.

The researchers also found that quitting smoking is uncommon in India and most people stopped only after they fell ill.

The researchers compared the situation in India with the Western country and China, which showed significant progress in making people quit smoking, Therefore, the number of deaths caused by smoking are reduced in Western countries.
“Where quitting has become common, death rates do come down. And that, so far, has mainly been confined to western countries, China is showing some promise but India is way behind,” said Dr. Jha.

Health Minister Anbumani Ramadoss said the findings of the study are alarming.

“The government of India is trying to take all steps to control tobacco use – in particular by informing the poop and the illiterate,” he said in a statement according to the AP.

The study, funded by government health institutes of India, Canada and Britain was published Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine.