Need Local Evidence That Smoking Causes Cancer: BJP's Dilip Gandhi

A BJP parliamentarian's declaration that India has little independent evidence to link cigarettes and cancer has stunned doctors, leaders from other parties and provoked a note of sharp dissent from his own. DK Gandhi, who is from the ruling BJP and represents Maharashtra in the Lok Sabha, heads a parliamentary committee that's assessing a government proposal to dissuade smoking. Mr Gandhi told NDTV on Monday, "Research that needs to be conducted on this by the Indian government has not been done, on whether this causes cancer or not." After an angry backlash, he said today, "Tobacco is injurious to health, there's no doubt about that. But why should we go by surveys done in other countries?" He also said that crores of people are employed by tobacco-related industries - "surveys should focus on that too."