India: Bollywood Shows More Smoking

Source from:  Deccan Chronicle (in)  04/27/2013

Top grossing Bollywood films deliver about 14.3 billion separate tobacco images to audiences — in terms of numbers of images multiplied by numbers of viewers, many more than the estimated 920 million images delivered by Hollywood films, a study has found.

For the new study, researchers from Imperial College London, in collaboration with an  NGO, Health Related Information Dissemination Amongst Youth, analysed the top 15 Bollywood films released every year from 2006 to 2008 and recorded their "tobacco occurrences."

Researchers found that half of the U and U/A certified films contained tobacco images. It was highest in adult rated films (A certificate) at 13.7. The figures for U and U/A rated films were 1.9 and 2.9, respectively. Because of the huge popularity of Bollywood films the number of total images seen as a multiple of audience numbers amounted to 14.3 billion a year. Enditem