Smokers light up near schools

Hyderabad: Selling tobacco products near educational institutions has become very common. Despite the Cigarettes and Tobacco Prohibition Act (COTPA) 2013, Section 6 (b), clearly stating that no stalls selling tobacco products should be set up within 100 yards of educational institutions and hospitals, GHMC and the district health officers have hardly cracked down on these outlets openly selling cigarettes, gutka etc.

A drive conducted by a newspaper has revealed that Keys High Schools, Deewan Bahadur Padma Rao Mudaliar College for Women, St. Mary's School and College, St. Francis School and Inter College and St. Patrick's School, all in Secunderabad, are surrounded by tobacco shops.

Slate School, Abids, has a paan shop next to the gate and it’s the same with Sujatha College, Nampally. More than 60 per cent institutions have paan shops adjacent to their walls.

There are four paan shops (Classics, Samreen, Sangeetha and an unnamed shop) opposite St. Ann’s High School, S. D. Road, Secunderabad. One of Hyderabad’s oldest, Stanley School and College for Women, Nampally, has four shops within 100 metres. The situation is the same in the case of Glendale and Chinmaya Vidyalaya in Begumpet, Bhavan’s Sainikpuri and Secunderabad Public School, Marredpally. Meanwhile, the compound wall of the English and Foreign Language University is a mini smoking joint.

Tobacco products are also openly sold outside Apollo Hospital, Jubilee Hills, and Yashoda Hospital, Secunderabad. There are such stalls every couple of meters outside the Niloufer Children’s Hospital and MNJ Institute for Cancer, Red Hills. The premises outside the Gandhi, Osmania and Koti Maternity Hospitals are also full of such shops.

In all government hospitals, cigarettes are sold within the hospital premises itself, as is clearly visible at Gandhi and Osmania. Hyderabad district medical authorities said that earlier the state tobacco control cell, that operated only from Hyderabad and Guntur districts, functioned independently from the state administration. However, the Hyderabad tobacco conrol unit has now been ordered to work with the district medical officials.

“The walls of the institutions are being used to set up tobacco selling stalls; leave alone sales, these places are becoming smoking zones. On an average, these stalls make up to Rs 40,000 per month and get away by bribing the traffic and GHMC departments. A rapid increase is seen in the number of stalls even on city roads, especially for the call centre crowds,” said K. Subash Reddy, resident of S.D. Road.

So far neither the district medical health authorities, nor the GHMC or traffic department have seized any of these stalls.