Written by: Express News Service
3 min readMumbaiMay 21, 2009 03:28 AM IST
First published on: May 21, 2009 at 03:28 AM IST
Months after the anti-smoking law was implemented in the country,restaurants and bars in the city fare better than suburbs on complaince with the anti-smoking law,reveals a study. Another survey points out that air quality in smoking areas of the city is even worse than that around the Deonar dumping ground.
If this recent survey is to be believed,there is a clear divide between the city and suburb restaurants and bars in abiding by the law that bans smoking. As opposed to the suburbs (68%),city restaurants have already achieved an 81% of smoke-free environment in March 2009.
“Reinforcing the benefits of the implementation of the law,the findings from a survey in Mumbai have shed some interesting trends with regard to the smoke-free compliance amongst restaurants in the city and suburbs. Nearly 80% of the restaurants in the city and 70% of restaurants in the suburbs are smoke-free,” said Dr Surendra Shastri,professor and head of department of preventive oncology at Tata Memorial Centre.
Another study initiated by the same institute analysed air quality in restaurants that allow smoking and Deonar dumping ground and revealed some disturbing facts. Air quality level at these restaurants was worse— average 363 cubic metre— as compared to the highly polluted dumping ground where the level is only 163 cubic metre. “Air quality at indoor public places where the smoking is seen,is far worse than that of garbage dumping grounds,” said Dr P C Gupta.
Both the studies were instituted by the Healis Sekhsaria Institute for Public Health,one of the stake holders in the ‘smoke-free Mumbai campaign’ along with the state government,Food and Drug Association,Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) and Tata Memorial Hospital.
The first study pointed out that 13 per cent was the rate of smoking in city area while it’s 32 per cent in the suburbs.
“The study is a cross sectional study design with a sample size of 60 restaurants,which were surveyed. Around 60% of the restaurants surveyed were in the suburbs—Dadar was used as cut-off point for city and suburb— and 62% of the restaurants surveyed were in the city,” said Dr P C Gupta Director,Healis Sekhsaria Institute for Public Research.
Air quality was worse in hookah bars and country liquor bars. It was 707.04 cubic microns and 326 cubic microns respectively.
“The level of pollution there is higher than the most hazardous in health category as given by the US Environmental Protection Agency,” said Dr Gupta.
Globally,the hospitality industry has been regarded as the single-most important stakeholder in any attempts towards achieving a smoke-free environment. In Mumbai,there are over 7500 such establishments and they are spread across 24 wards of the BMC.
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