The answer: India’s 270 million tobacco users are not the product of individual weakness. They are the product of specific historical, economic, social, and cultural forces, many deliberately cultivated by an industry that understood Indian society better than public health did.

History – four centuries of normalized use

Tobacco arrived in India in the sixteenth century through Portuguese traders. Within decades it integrated into existing paan and betel nut culture, entered Mughal court practice, and normalized across social classes and regions. By the time health consequences were understood, tobacco had been embedded in Indian social life for four hundred years- transmitted across generations as tradition rather than recognized as addiction.

Economics – the product of poverty

Bidi at fifty paise. Khaini at two rupees. Gutka at five rupees. No other psychoactive substance provides a pharmacological effect (stimulation, stress relief, dopamine) at a price accessible to the daily wage economy.

The tobacco industry understood this, pricing bidi and smokeless products specifically to remain within reach of India’s lowest-income populations, lobbying for favorable tax treatment to keep them affordable, and building distribution networks that ensured availability at every tea stall and roadside shop in every village in the country.

Social currency – tobacco as inclusion

The offered bidi at a work break. The khaini shared between agricultural laborers. The paan offered to guests. The gutka circulated among a crew.

Tobacco functions as social currency- a gesture of inclusion, hospitality, and belonging. Declining it carries a social cost. In communities where use is near-universal, non-use requires continuous social negotiation that use does not. The person who quits tobacco in such a community is not just breaking a chemical dependency; they are renegotiating their social position.

Occupation – tobacco and labor

Nicotine’s ability to maintain alertness, reduce fatigue, and provide brief stimulation during physically demanding, repetitive, extended work has made it a functional occupational tool for millions of Indian workers. The construction site khaini, the truck driver’s cigarette, the tea break bidi- all embedded in occupational routines where tobacco provides a real, if damaging, short-term functional benefit.

Gender and masculinity

Male tobacco use is heavily encoded with adult male identity- the bidi-smoking laborer, the gutka-chewing worker, the cigarette-smoking urban professional, each representing a version of masculinity in which tobacco marks experience and social maturity. Initiation is frequently a rite of passage.

Female tobacco use (mishri, khaini, smokeless products) is largely invisible in public health data and cessation programs calibrated around the male smoker, leaving the most hidden users the least served.

Industry – deliberate market cultivation

India’s tobacco epidemic is not organic. It is the product of systematic industry cultivation – a tobacco product engineered for every price point, every cultural context, every demographic segment. Film placement that made smoking synonymous with masculinity and rebellion across the world’s largest cinema audience. Distribution networks that made tobacco the most accessible consumer product in India. Product development that ensured no Indian social context lacked a tobacco product designed for it.

The cessation infrastructure gap

Against these forces, India’s cessation infrastructure is thin, urban-concentrated, English-language-biased, and calibrated for the cigarette smoker rather than the bidi, gutka, khaini, or paan masala user who constitutes the majority of India’s tobacco burden.

The person most burdened by tobacco is the person least reached by the infrastructure designed to help them.

The one thing to hold onto

270 million Indians use tobacco because tobacco was made available, affordable, socially embedded, culturally normalized, and pharmacologically compelling by centuries of history and decades of deliberate industry cultivation.

Understanding this does not remove individual agency. It accurately assigns the share of responsibility that belongs to history, economics, and industry; and leaves the share that belongs to the individual to be exercised with accurate understanding of what they are working against.

The individual quit is always possible. Always harder than it should be. And always more meaningful because of everything that was working against it.