LONDON: Indian women have now figured right on top in an infamous list – smoking .

In a shocking trend, India has now more female smokers – over 12.1 million – than any country except the United States.

In 2012, female smoking prevalence was 3.2%, which is virtually unchanged since 1980.

Smokers in India consumed an average of 8.2 cigarettes per day as tobacco claims a million lives every year in the country.

Smoking has emerged as the third top risk for health loss in India.

Between 1980 and 2012, smoking prevalence among Indian men decreased from 33.8% to 23%.

In 2012, 967 million people smoked every day globally compared with 721 million in 1980.

Around three in 10 men (31%) and one in 20 women (6%) now smoke daily compared with four in 10 men (41%) and one in 10 women (10%) in 1980.

These are the findings of the study “Smoking Prevalence and Cigarette Consumption in 187 countries, 1980-2012,” which was published on January 8 in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

India has been found to have made progress in reducing the prevalence of daily smoking among men, according to new research from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME).

However tobacco use (excluding second-hand smoke) led to 6.1% of years of life lost due to premature death, and 5.1% of health loss in India.

“Smoking rates remain dangerously high for men and there is more work to be done to drive these rates lower,” said Dr K Srinath Reddy, president of the Public Health Foundation of India, in response to the findings.

“The high number of female smokers in India is also troubling,” he added.

“Despite the tremendous progress made on tobacco control, much more remains to be done,” said IHME director Dr Christopher Murray. “We have the legal means to support tobacco control, and where we see progress being made we need to look for ways to accelerate that progress. Where we see stagnation, we need to find out what’s going wrong.”

The number of cigarettes smoked annually has grown to more than 6 trillion. In 75 countries, smokers consumed an average of more than 20 cigarettes per day in 2012.

Data released earlier had found that smoking is eight times more prevalent among Indian men than women.

However, an average Indian female smoker puffs more cigarettes a day (7) than male (6.1).

Over one in five (21%) Indian male tobacco users smoke daily as against only around 3% of women.

Nearly half of Indian men (47.9%) aged 15 years and above consume tobacco. Nearly 206 million Indians use smokeless form of tobacco (loose-leaf chewing tobacco and snuff). Smokeless tobacco use is high among Indian men at 32.9%.

One in every five female tobacco users in India uses the smokeless form as against one in 10 who smoke. Also, an average Indian woman is taking up smoking at 17.5 years as against 18.8 years among men. These were the new estimates of global tobacco use, published in the medical journal the Lancet few months ago.

The quit rate was low in India with less than 20% of adults who had ever smoked saying they had given up.