Ketki Shah received a doctoral fellowship under the DBT/Wellcome Trust India Alliance project led by Dr. Upendra Bhojani. She has registered her PhD in December 2020 at The University of Trans-Disciplinary Health Sciences and Technology (TDU). At TDU, her PhD is co-supervised by Dr. Prakash BN. Her PhD focuses on understanding from a worker’s perspectives the issues, and experiences with shifting to alternative and safer non-tobacco livelihoods.

Ketki’s PhD is divided into three phases. In the first phase, she plans to do an integrative review to explore and review the initiatives that have been tried out in South and South East Asia. The findings will be used to understand factors that influence transitioning to non-tobacco livelihoods. In the second stage, she aims to map the supply chain of bidi in Gujarat to identify the processes, geographies and workers involved. And finally in the third phase, she plans to conduct a primary qualitative inquiry with former and current bidi workers. This is to understand from their perspectives the dynamics and drivers for transitioning to alternative non-tobacco livelihoods.

She hopes that the evidence generated would inform processes that protect workers (from occupational-hazards and livelihood losses) as the demand and supply for tobacco hopefully reduces with tobacco control measures.

Amiti Varma from the DEEP project presented a paper on “Situating tobacco in health policy: Using parliament as an instrument of accountability” at the 6th Global Symposium on Health Systems Research (8 – 12 November, 2020). She presented findings from an analysis of two decades of tobacco-related questions in Indian parliament. This is part of a broader project (DEEP) that is also looking at parliamentary questions as one of the ways of understanding public policy towards tobacco.