BACKGROUND: Globally, attempts at understanding the influence of businesses on public (health) policies is on the rise. Tobacco industry has been studied for its influence in shaping the tobacco epidemic and regulations. The WHO FCTC proposes measures to prevent tobacco industry interference (TII) in public health policies recognising a fundamental conflict between tobacco industry interests and that of public health policies/programs. India serves as the second largest consumer and among the top producers/exporters of tobacco in the world. While much of the prevailing research concerns trans-national corporations and focused globally and/or national level, we attempted to better understand TII at the sub-national level in India over the 1990-2017 period.
METHODS: We mapped TII incidents in 10 Indian states for the period 1990-2017 using information from media archives, internal industry documents and annual reports of tobacco companies. We scored each incident using a tool adopted from the SEATCA TII Index. The greater the score, the greater the extent of TII.
RESULTS: We found a total of 221 TII incidents leading to a total TII score of 875.2. Karnataka had the highest number of incidents (111) and TII score (436.8) while Nagaland had none. The highest number of incidents were related to governments providing benefits to tobacco industry (121) followed by the CSR by tobacco industry (64), forms of unnecessary interactions between governments and tobacco industry (26) and industry participation in policy development (10).
CONCLUSIONS: Our study, probably for the first time, charts out the nature of the extent of TII at sub-national level over a historical period. While TII varies significantly across states, there remains significant TII in some of the states undermining effective implementation of tobacco control measures. This implies the need for nation-wide policy to prevent TII in line with the WHO FCTC article 5.3 and the stringent enforcement of the existing policies.