Lucknow: To dissuade people from smoking on campus, King George’s Medical University (KGMU) on Tuesday launched its ‘Mission No Smoking Campus’ from Shatabdi hospital.
Launched to mark the World No Tobacco Day, the campaign will see radio jockeys (RJ) attached with the university’s community radio ‘Goonj’ move around campus with microphones and speak to attendants waiting outside various wards and open spaces of the university and indulging in smoking.
“The RJs will record interviews of such people in public with an aim to demotivate them from smoking. These interviews will also be played out on the radio and the smokers will be counselled to not become detrimental to their own and other people’s lives on campus,” said Goonj officer incharge Prof Vinod Jain.
“We hope that such public embarrassment of RJs putting the microphones in front of their faces and puttng them in a spot will actually make them change their smoking behaviour,” he added. The campaign will be an ongoing one which will include sensitization for 15 days at one unit followed by another to cover the entire campus. “The campaign has begun from Shatabdi hospital and after a fortnight it will be taken to Lari Cardiology, then to Trauma centre, to the OPD and so on,” said Prof Jain. He also informed that tobacco and cigarette making not just hampers the health of farmers and their families, but also the country spends three times more money on eradicating its ills than the revenue generated through its sale.
“The country gets a revenue of Rs 35,600 crore from tobacco and its products sale but spends Rs 1,04,500 crore on its harms,” he said.
