The Brave Pedestrian

21 April 2016, Mumbai: With the backdrop of the Union Labour Ministry's tripartite consultations reported to be happening today to “assess the impact of the mandated larger pictorial warnings covering 85% of packaging space on the livelihood of 1.50 crore bidi workers”, nine bidi smokers who suffered from cancer, and their bereaved relatives, today wrote a letter to Mr Virjesh Upadhyay, Secretary of Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh, which claims to be the bidi workers' trade union. Download a copy of the open letter on behalf of bidi victims . (Incidentally, bidi-rollers are not the enemy of bidi smokers and their   families, although it is in the name of bidi-rollers that Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh is trying to help the bidi industry evade the 85% pictorial warnings. Bidi-rollers are themselves a downtrodden and exploited lot -- largely dirt-poor child labourers, especially girls, often pushed into debt by the bidi industry contractors, and they have no genuine spokesmen. Bidi...

Mohd Azazur Rahman, an electrical engineer from Basti district of Uttar Pradesh, was forced to come to Mumbai’s Tata Memorial Hospital last month. It turned out that he was a great fan of Pehelwan brand of bidis all his life, smoking 2-3 packs per day. Even today, although his disfiguring oral cancer is painfully evident, he is having a hard time kicking the habit and still ends up smoking 4-5 Pehelwan bidis every day.