Wednesday, November 13, 2013

Ban smoking zones inside campus


This is a concern I have been having in my mind for some time now.

My first concern is -
Is there any social responsibility of organization creating revenue of billions of dollars? 
Or the management just running it for their own deeds so that they can live life king size?

Coming to the main topic of this post:

Is there any one good point of keeping smoking zones inside campus? As far as I know smoking is considered as a drug.
So is the organization promoting drugs in campus? There are many drugs available! why couldn’t stalls be opened for them as well?!. 
Smokers say it is a light drug. It increases concentration. Why don’t serve a peg of alcohol along with the lunch? even that will be a light drug for most of the employees. So that employees can solve difficult problems with increased concentration!!
Organization says they are providing it so that people don’t smoke at random places. If that’s the case, why not ask them to smoke outside the campus instead of supporting the idea of smoking by providing the “Smoking Zone?” Smoking zone does no good thing other than collecting the ashes. But what about the smoke going into the atmosphere? What about the other non-smokers passing by and getting affected by passive smoking?

On one hand the organization wants to keep their employees healthy by  providing facilities like gym, sports grounds and regularly organizing sports events. On the other hand, in front of gym itself there is smoking zone.
It is like sweat out in gym for health and smoke the health out of your body with a smoke at smoking zone!! Is it that the organization gives out an option to smoke out your problems to air?
Why not ban smoking within the campus?
All social networking sites get blocked even when they don’t create any health problems. But yes they might affect employees’ productivity. Why not ban smoking, this also affects employees’ productivity and that too even in worse manner since every hour or two smokers need a half an hour break for smoking.

IT sector comprises of the most educated people. If one can’t stop them from smoking how would the illiterate people stop it.  
In theatres or TVs for every movie they show ads to stop tobacco and also the subtitle pops up “Smoking is injurious to health“ every time the actor on screen takes up a cigarette! Then why allow in IT?

The simple solution and I must say the toughest is to give an option to the smoker employees to quit smoking in office hours or quit the job. It will be their wish what they want to do!
I said toughest because if they choose to quit the job organization will lose 10% of its’ employees. 

Adding some facts from Wikipedia :
There are approximately 120 million smokers in India. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), India is home to 12% of the world’s smokers. Approximately 900,000 people die every year in India due to smoking as of 2009. According to a 2002 WHO estimate, 30% of adult males in India smoke. Among adult females, the figure is much lower at between 3–5%.
According to the study, "A Nationally Representative Case-Control Study of Smoking and Death in India", tobacco will be responsible for 1 in 5 of all male deaths and 1 in 20 of all female deaths in the country by 2010. This means approximately 1 million Indians would die annually from smoking by 2010.

The ban could help the young and old working in an organization to get some more hours of their life.

Pour your views in comments. 

P.S : This post is regarding all the organizations that support smoking.