20% of Indian teens at moderate to high risk of alcohol, tobacco use; Guwahati tops list, Nagpur safest: Study
The numbers behind the headline
Researchers surveyed students in 108 schools spread across six districts: Gorakhpur in UP, Kamrup (Guwahati) in Assam, Nagpur in Maharashtra, Gujarat’s Rajkot, Deoghar in Jharkhand, and Puducherry. Both government and private institutions were covered, giving the study a fairly broad social cross-section.
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The headline figure: roughly 21 out of every 100 teens surveyed fell into the moderate-to-high risk bracket for substance use. Break that down further and about 10 percent carried a moderate risk while another 11 percent were flagged as high-risk. The remaining close to four-fifths of the sample were classified as low-risk.
Where things get interesting is the geographic spread. Guwahati and Deoghar reported the largest share of at-risk adolescents, whereas Nagpur and Puducherry stood out for having mostly low-risk students. The gap between the highest and lowest risk cities ,Guwahati versus Nagpur ,worked out to a striking 35 percentage points. Researchers say only around two-fifths of that gap can be pinned down to measurable factors like school environment, family income and background, or personality traits, leaving a fair amount unexplained by the data alone.
Screens, gender, and who’s more at risk
A few patterns cut across all six locations. Teens who spent more time glued to screens showed a noticeably higher risk profile, and so did those who held a more permissive or accepting attitude toward drugs and alcohol in general. Somewhat counter to popular assumption, girls in the sample showed higher odds of falling into a riskier category than boys did.
To arrive at these numbers, the team leaned on two well-established tools: the World Health Organization’s ASSIST questionnaire, which screens for alcohol, tobacco and other substance involvement, and a separate scale called SURPS that maps personality traits linked to risk-taking. Scientists from AIIMS Gorakhpur and JIPMER Puducherry were among those who led the work, and they point out that very few Indian studies have used a standardised instrument like ASSIST to look at multiple substances together ,most existing research tends to be patchy or limited to single cities.
What’s driving the risk ,and what might curb it
The study’s authors are fairly blunt about the takeaway: where a teenager lives and studies shapes their risk far more than any one personal choice. Easy access to substances, heavy digital exposure, and being surrounded by generally risky behaviour among peers all pushed the numbers up. On the flip side, teens who stayed socially engaged ,through friendships, activities, community ties ,appeared somewhat shielded from that risk.
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That, the researchers argue, is exactly why blanket awareness campaigns aren’t cutting it anymore. Instead, they’re pushing for interventions tailored to local realities ,stricter enforcement around where and how substances are sold to minors, stronger media literacy programmes to counter the digital-exposure angle, and wider rollout of peer-led models such as the Community Based Peer-Led Intervention, ideally folded into the existing School Health Programme.
For a country with one of the largest adolescent populations in the world, the study is a reminder that a one-size-fits-all approach to prevention may be doing less good than assumed ,and that solutions built around a school’s or district’s actual conditions could matter more than generic warnings ever will.
(Source: PTI)
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