“Why do they allow making of cigarettes, if they want us to stop smoking them,” says Rohit, a 25 year old management student living in Delhi.

As per WHO (World Health Organisation) tobacco is one of the major cause of deaths in India, accounting for over ten lakh deaths every year. In spite of that, according to the National Family Health Survey – carried out in 2005-06, 57 % men and 10 % women in India use tobacco in one form or another. Even after the notification of “Prohibition of Smoking in Public Places Rules, 2008”, which took effect from 2nd October, 2008 it seems that the rate of use of tobacco has not come decreased as expected.

Cigarettes, and most tobacco products, are cheap, and readily available. Most people who smoke do not think twice about the statutory warning about cigarette being injurious to the smoker’s health. They just light up, and puff away anyways.

One of my friend, who recently quit smoking, told me that one day he happened to look at a picture, where the lung of a smoker was shown in contrast to a lung of a non-smoker. The difference, he said, was so stark that he could not gather courage to light up another cigarette ever again.

The power of visuals is undeniable. A picture, they say, speaks a thousand words; sometimes even more. This is especially true for the effects of tobacco products. No amount of words can express, what can be expressed by a picture of a patient with either oral or lung cancer. This has been realised by anti-tobacco lobbyists all across the world, and many nations have already made it mandatory for tobacco products to to carry pictorial warnings, along with the statutory text warning.

In India too, a law to carry such warnings on tobacco products has been in the offing for a long time. But, in the face of  the pressure exerted by the pro-tobacco lobby, the law has been postponed several times in the past. But, come 30th May, 2009 and the pictorial warnings on all tobacco products will become a reality. It is to expected that after the products carry the pictorial warnings, the use of tobacco products will decline.

After all who will like to carry a picture of damaged lungs, skulls, or a scorpion (three of the proposed pictures) in his pocket. Not me.