Poster girl of anti-tobacco battle dies

In a tragic co-incidence, just the day when the Government’s proposed notification to increase pictorial warnings by 85 per cent on tobacco packets failed  to take off, Sunita Tomar, 28, the face of India’s tobacco battle, died at her native village in Madhya Pradesh in the early hours of Wednesday.  Ironically, she met a similar fate as that of  Mukesh Harane, a 24-year-old matriculate, hailing from Bhusawal, Maharashtra, who was the face of the Oral Cancer campaigns in India for the last couple of years. He succumbed to tobacco in 2009.  Sunita, whose face was disfigured by oral cancer, was re-admitted to Mumbai’s Tata Memorial Hospital a few days back where she expressed her last wish to spend time with her kids and family. “We told her she had very less time left. Her family had exhausted their finances for her treatment and the social welfare department at the hospital was funding her treatment,” said Pankaj Chaturvedi, head and neck oncosurgeon and department head at Tata Hospital.

Two days before she died, she wrote to Prime Minister Narendra Modi about her disappointment at BJP MP Dilip Gandhi’s statement in his capacity as chairman of lok Sabha’s Committee of Subordinate legislations that there are no Indian studies linking tobacco to cancer.  In her letter, she wrote that she was shocked that people in such high posts can be so irresponsible. 

“Bigger warnings can probably save some innocent lives like mine. You have started to take people along in your Mann Ki Baat where you recently talked about de-addiction. I hope you will also take up the cause of tobacco.”  Though, Sunita is only one of the 10 lakh Indians who die every year because of tobacco, I am sure her campaign must have saved millions from picking up the habit, said Chaturvedi.

Under pressure from various quarters and citing the Parliamentary panel’s observations, Union Health Ministry under its boss JP Nadda has kept in abeyance its initial decision to have bigger tobacco pack warnings that were meant to deter the users, particularly youth, from consuming tobacco. The move has drawn flak from health experts as well as elected representatives like MP Supriya Sule who termed it as “absurd.”  Incidentally, during the tenure of Nadda’s predecessor, Harshvardhan, the Ministry had formed two committees to recommend measures on how to address the social and legal aspects of the war against tobacco use. “This should not remain a government agenda. I would like to involve social groups and civil society. The fight will be long and arduous, but we should not lose hope,” he had said.

A Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI) study, supported by the Health Ministry and WHO, had estimated that total economic costs attributable to tobacco-use from all diseases in India in 2011 amounted to Rs 1,04,500 crore — 12 per cent more than the combined state and central Government expenditure on health care the same year. According to a lancet study, tobacco-related diseases kill about 2,500 Indians daily and over 10 lakh Indians every year.