Ankur Modi explains a science-first, scale-driven roadmap for India’s smoke-free transition, with emphasis on adult-only access and value addition.
At Technovation Dubai 2025, Ankur Modi, Cluster Head for South Asia and Indochina at Philip Morris International, offered a tightly argued view of how smoke-free transitions can progress in Asia, and how India might approach the question through science, safeguards, and scale. There was one core idea underpinning our conversation with him, “Focus on trying to solve for the smoker’s life. That is the most important thing.”
Setting the regional scene, Modi clarified what “access” means in practice. He defined it as the lawful availability of non-combustible nicotine products to adult smokers under local rules. “Across Asia and the Pacific, when you count the markets where such categories are permitted and present, we are comfortably in double digits,” he said.
To illustrate proximity rather than prescribe policy, he added, “All the countries which have land borders touching India, every country has a smoke-free product. Every.” The point was not to compare regimes, it was to underline that access tends to follow tailored regulation.
Modi framed regulation as the central enabler of switching for adults who would otherwise continue smoking. He argued that health outcomes improve when rules reflect the difference between combusted and non-combusted categories. “If smoke-free products are treated like cigarettes, it does not work, because the harm of cigarettes is here, the harm of these product categories sits on the lower side.” He paired this with the need for responsible communication. “You also need an environment where you are allowed to communicate to adult smokers. How do you get the smoker switching and stop smoking?”
On India’s current position, he emphasised evidence generation. “Local scientific studies have to be done in India,” he said, pointing to emissions data, biomarkers, and real-world switching as useful inputs for policy. He offered a simple scientific primer to explain the rationale behind smoke-free strategies. “What creates cancer? The word combustion, nobody will say,” he noted. “If combustion is eliminated, you solve for the problem of many carcinogenic elements. Nicotine is not carcinogenic.” He also stressed that these products are for adults, are not risk-free, and must be evaluated case by case.
Responsibility, he argued, sits squarely with industry to lead with innovation and accept trade-offs. “PMI has had the courage to actually cannibalise its own profits,” he said, framing self-disruption as a prerequisite for transition. He signalled openness on intellectual property if it aids public health goals. “If you come and ask me, will PMI be willing to give some of the patents to its own competitors in India, I would say yes. We are not going to shy away from it because what is the problem we are solving? We are solving for the smoker’s life.”
Affordability for a large base of price-sensitive users led him to India’s structural advantage. “What is the beauty of India which no other country in the world has? It is called scale,” he said. “You bring technology, it scales and it reduces the cost.” He expects rapid adaptation as engineering, taste profiles, and formats are refined locally. “It is going to be an explosion of innovation which will come through.”
On public finance, Modi referenced international practice without prescribing any course for India. “Most of the governments across the world, they tax differently,” he said, describing a sequencing in which cigarettes carry higher rates, while better alternatives may be differentiated at first and adjusted over time as the market mix evolves. The message was continuity, not disruption. “There is a point in time where the curve changes,” he said, noting that overall value can remain stable as categories rebalance.
Agriculture and value addition featured prominently. Modi argued that farmer incomes benefit when leaf exports are complemented by domestic manufacturing of higher-value finished goods. “If you do an analysis of India’s per kilo pricing for exports and compare it within the Asia region, India is lower by an average 7-to-15 percent because they(other Asian producers) have value-added products, and Indian producers do not have it,” he said. He set out a dual track, “Value-added products coming in, and alternate crops,” paired with better agronomy and traceability. His emphasis was on durable capabilities. “I do not believe that just cash disbursement is going to give anything. That is not a long-term sustainable solution unless you provide an ecosystem and toolkit that enables productivity.”
Foreign direct investment, in his view, can accelerate modernisation and diversification. “FDI coming in will certainly modernise the whole sector,” he said. He also highlighted non-nicotine opportunities for the plant itself. “A tobacco plant can be used for biofuel. It can be used for insecticides. It can be used for personal products. It can be used to make bags.” The broader point was that research and scale can open multiple, responsibly governed value chains.
On integrity and enforcement, Modi described a collaborative posture. “We have an organisation inside PMI which is purely focused on this topic,” he said, referring to illicit trade and counterfeits. “They share information, and when you start sharing information with the government from the sources and all, then we expect the government to act on it.” For him, traceability, adult-only access, and enforcement are parts of the same system.
Questions on spending priorities drew a clear split between central research and market execution. “Ninety-nine point five percent of the R&D spends is for smoke-free products,” he said, listing “battery tech,” “software,” “new designs,” and “new flavours, new formats,” to reflect local preferences. Commercial effort focuses on behaviour change. “Getting the consumer switching is a task,” Modi said. “Making the product and the consumer switching is the biggest effort which goes there.”
He closed with a broader invitation to stakeholders, including researchers, clinicians, industry, and the media. “Focus on trying to solve for the smoker’s life,” he said, encouraging evidence-based discussion, robust safeguards, and access limited to adults. The through-line was straightforward, science, scale, and responsible systems can work together to improve outcomes for adults who would otherwise continue to smoke
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