229 million males in India consume tobacco
Around 229 million males in India consume tobacco. Only China has more male smokers — 331 million.Over 11 million Indian women use tobacco while 5 million smoke cigarettes or bidis and 6 million others chew it. As a result, female smokers in India die an average of eight years earlier than their non-smoking peers. India is also the third leading producer of leaf tobacco, after China and Brazil. Over one lakh hectares of land is devoted to growing tobacco. These are the findings of the world's latest `Tobacco Atlas', which will be released in Mumbai on Monday. The Atlas has projected that tobacco will kill 6 million people annually from 2010, more than 80% of which will happen in low- and middle-resource countries like India. These untimely deaths will drain $500 billion from the global economy each year as a result of lost productivity, misused resources, ineffective taxation and premature death. The Atlas, prepared by the World Lung Foundation and the American Cancer Soc