London: Bollywood is again in the limelight, but this time it is for inadvertently encouraging youngsters to smoke, with World Health Organisation (WHO) saying three out of four films produced in the last decade had shown the stars smoking.

Teenagers who watch Bollywood characters smoke are three times as likely to do so themselves, the WHO said in a first such study on the Indian film industry released on February 17.

Indian government has said it will legislate later this year to ban smoking in public, the sponsorship of sporting events by tobacco companies and media advertisements of tobacco products.

However, Ambika Srivastava, who conducted the WHO research, said the Bollywood film industry had slipped under the proposed controls.

"The WHO and countries across the world are looking at bans on tobacco advertising but the (film) industry finds ways of getting around it," she said.

Bollywood produces 800 films a year, which are watched by 15 million people every day. A third of Indian television programming is based on Bollywood movies, which are also widely watched in Pakistan and Bangladesh.

The WHO survey found that 76 per cent of the most popular films produced between 1991 and 2002 showed some form of tobacco use. In 72 per cent of cases this was cigarette smoking.

Srivastava found that half of India's leading stars, including Shahrukh Khan, Vivek Oberoi, Ajay Devgan and Jackie Shroff, had smoked on screen.

PTI