India's real smoke. Roughly three and a half bidis burn for every cigarette, mostly in rural India and mostly untaxed.
≈ 10,432 per secondA live counter · India only
India smokes about 94 billion cigarettes and 329 billion bidis a year, and tobacco kills about 13.5 lakh Indians a year. The counters on this page spread those annual figures across the seconds of the year, so they show a pace rather than a live feed. Each one is described in the text beside it.
Every number here is an annual estimate, spread across the seconds of the year. Most are official. The largest, the bidi count, is not: nobody publishes one, so this page builds it.
Global trackers count cigarettes, so India looks like a light smoker: 90 cigarettes per adult a year, one of the lowest rates anywhere. But cigarettes are only about a tenth of the tobacco Indians actually use. The bidi does the rest, and almost nobody counts it.
Smoked in India every year. Three and a half bidis for every cigarette, and the bidi figure is the one nobody publishes.
India's real smoke. Roughly three and a half bidis burn for every cigarette, mostly in rural India and mostly untaxed.
≈ 10,432 per secondTreatment, lost work and early death in 2017-18, the last year measured, adding up to more than 1% of GDP.
₹56,235 per second, at 2017-18 pricesAbout 5,500 young people pick up tobacco every day. Most daily smokers in India started before they turned 20.
One every 16 seconds20,571 tonnes of filters a year. They are plastic, not paper, and they are the most littered object on earth.
0.65 kg per secondA long-term smoker dies about ten years earlier than a non-smoker. This counts only the 10 lakh deaths a year that come from smoking, not the full 13.5 lakh from all tobacco, because the ten-year figure is a smoker's.
Estimated, 10 years per smoking deathFor every ₹100 the government collected as excise on tobacco in 2016-17, tobacco cost the economy ₹816 in treatment and lost work. The gap is not paid by the industry. It is paid by everybody.
13.5 lakh deaths a year, counting both smoking and khaini, gutkha and other smokeless forms. That is 154 people every hour.
One life every 23 secondsEverything above is the country. This one is just you. Tell it when you started and it walks back through what a smoke actually cost in each of those years, not what it costs today. Bidis are counted separately, because they are taxed nothing like cigarettes are.
Put that same money aside every month instead, from the year you started until now, growing at % a year. You would be holding ₹0 today.
I ain't Nirankur Warikyun, but you would have definitely saved a lot.
Prices come from a fixed index of what a smoke cost in India, not a rate you guess at. The cigarette index is pinned to the government's own CPI for cigarettes, base 2012 = 100, which read 123 in early 2014 and 186 by late 2018, and to the tobacco price rises that followed. Years before 2012 are worked backwards from the trend of that period and are the roughest part of this. The February 2026 jump is the largest in the table because the GST compensation cess ended on 31 January 2026 and was replaced the next day by a 40% GST slab, an additional central excise of ₹2,050 to ₹8,500 per 1,000 sticks depending on cigarette length, and GST charged on the printed retail price instead of the manufacturer's transaction value (source 6). The bidi index is separate and much flatter, because bidi excise barely moved for years (about 28 paise a stick against ₹75.8 on cigarettes), so bidi prices followed ordinary inflation rather than a tax escalator. February 2026 is the one year the bidi line falls, because bidi GST was cut from 28% to 18% on the same day cigarette GST rose to 40%. Take the bidi figures as an order of magnitude and not a price list: most bidis are handmade and unbranded, and a 2021 survey across five states found the same 25-stick pack selling for anywhere between ₹5 and ₹25. The growth figure at the end is plain compound arithmetic on a rate you picked. It is not a forecast and it is not advice.
If any of this is about you or someone at home, the national quitline is free and it works better than going it alone.
1800 11 2356Inspired by Mukesh Harane of Bhusawal, Maharashtra, who died of oral cancer in 2009 at 24 after years of chewing gutka, and whose face has opened every film in an Indian cinema since.