Health Empirics

Processing is one of the prime activities in tobacco production and is a labour-intensive activity in India. It involves processes starting from cleaning raw tobacco leaves to crushing them into different sizes/particles or making fine dust in accordance with the requirements of the industries producing bidi, cigarette, zarda, mouth freshener, pan masala, khaini, snuff, and chewing tobacco. There is also a lack of information on the number of processing workers, their livelihood, and, the health hazards of working in tobacco processing units in India. This paper discusses the working conditions and livelihoods of tobacco processing workers and their health status. The study followed snowball sampling to identify a sample of 500 processing workers spread out in the states of Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Karnataka, Maharashtra, and West Bengal. The poor working conditions, lack of social security benefits, low standard of living among a majority of workers, reporting of chronic illness among processing workers, absence of scientific studies on the health conditions of workers, and a majority of processing workers not being happy with their employment are the reasons enough for policy intervention to look into their working conditions and find out ways and means to rehabilitate them in other occupations and wean away the new entrants into tobacco processing job market. There is a need for scientific studies based on a large sample of processing workers capturing both clinically diagnosed and self- reported health symptoms for validating the linkage between exposure to tobacco dust and health problems among workers.

Keywords: Tobacco, Processing, Livelihood, Workers