India's bidi workers suffer for 1,000-a-day habit

Zainab Begum Alvi and her band of young helpers hunch over baskets filled with tobacco flakes and dried leaves, trying to roll a thousand dirt-cheap cigarettes a day at the behest of India's powerful bidi barons. "There is no other work than this, so if I don't do it, I can't do anything else," added Alvi, a tiny and gaunt woman from the impoverished northern state of Uttar Pradesh who says she is in her 50s. Three lawmakers from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party on a parliamentary committee looking into the issue were widely condemned when they cited a lack of evidence that smoking caused cancer as a reason for stalling the measure. "There is no medical evidence that bidis cause cancer," said Shyama Charan Gupta, one of the three lawmakers on the committee and who heads a company that produces one of the industry's best-selling brands.

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