ITC Sustainability Award for India''s Million Smoking Deaths

Source from:  Why Quit News  04/22/2014

India is home to 12% of the world's smokers (120 million), nearly one million annual smoking related deaths, and arguably the world's most brazen tobacco company, ITC Limited.

ITC Ltd was originally known as Imperial Tobacco Company and then India Tobacco Company. But name changes cannot hide the fact that 82 percent of 2012-13 ITC profits came from cigarette sales. Nor can it hide British American Tobacco's 30% ownership of ITC.

ITC's website boasts, "ITC is the market leader in cigarettes in India. With its wide range of invaluable brands, ITC has a leadership position in every segment of the market. ITC's highly popular portfolio of brands includes Insignia, India Kings, Lucky Strike, Classic, Gold Flake, Navy Cut, Players, Scissors, Capstan, Berkeley, Bristol, Flake, Silk Cut, Duke & Royal."

"Invaluable" brands? What ITC website visitors are not told is that smoking nicotine is highly addictive, that 80-90 percent of all lung cancers are attributable to smoking, or that 40-50 percent of ITC's nicotine addicts smoke themselves to death, with up to one-quarter dying during middle-age.

ITC sells 80 percent of India's cigarettes. Reflect on the hypocrisy of ITC's campaign to become India's award winning environmentally friendly corporate sustainability champion, while also being the #1 corporate killer of Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, Chennai, Kolkata, Surat, Pune and Jaipur inhabitants.

A master at smoke-screens, it gets worse.

ITC is sponsoring India's national Spelling Bee. ITC is doing so using its "Classmate" (school notebooks) product line. ITC launched its Classmate product line in 2003, the same year India banned cigarette advertising.

Clearly, both the Classmate product line and a cigarette company sponsoring a national spelling bee are intended to inspire student trust and confidence in ITC, the exact opposite of the lesson India's children need to learn.

Correct lessons would be that 37% of India's children have experimented with smoking by age 10, that the mean age of smoking initiation is 12, and that the vast majority of newly addicted ITC smokers are children and teens.

ITC's corporate logo appears on every Classmate notebook sold. Daily exposure to it results corporate trust and loyalty archetype subconscious imprinting that may remain with the child for life. ITC knows that corporate trust will eventually increase the odds of the child experimenting with ITC cigarette brands upon learning that their trusted school supplies provider also sells cigarettes.

The correct lesson is that India expects 1.5 million annual tobacco related deaths by 2020, and the maker of Classmate notebooks, ITC, is a drug pusher who has been made rich through chemical addiction to smoked nicotine, an ethicless entity selling a weapon of mass destruction.

A correct lesson would be that while ITC Chairman Deveshwar has done a masterful job wrapping ITC in the finest clean technology in the world, what he cannot do is wash from ITC's hands the blood of the millions and millions of Indians ITC's cigarettes have killed over the past 102 years.

It isn't coincidence that ITC's burgundy colored Wills Navy Cut cigarette brand logo was used in creating its Wills Lifestyle clothing line and store signs. Nor is it chance that Players is both an ITC cigarette brand and a youth fashion clothing line. And it certainly isn't coincidence that a nicotine addiction corporation wants a daily presence, and a trust and confidence image, inside every school in India.

Please help spread the word. Tying students, their notebooks, clothing, spelling bees and trust to a nation's leading cigarette company is intolerable in a civilized society. Enditem