Why Is India Becoming the Cancer Capital?

Why more Indians are facing cancer, what pollution, tobacco, diet and delayed diagnosis really have to do with it, and what an ordinary family can do about it.

Why Is India Becoming the Cancer Capital? is a public-health investigation by Indian author Parvind Kumar into one of the country's most urgent and least understood crises. Rather than pointing to a single cause, the book traces how population growth and ageing, tobacco use, air pollution, changing diets, obesity, alcohol, and gaps in screening and diagnosis combine into a complex national burden.

The book moves chapter by chapter through the numbers behind the headlines, the outsized role of tobacco in its many Indian forms, the evidence on air pollution and PM2.5, and the cancers — breast, lung, oral, cervical, colorectal, and prostate — that the country cannot afford to ignore. It also examines how late diagnosis and the financial cost of treatment fall unevenly across regions, income groups, and rural and urban India.

Written to separate scientific evidence from popular myth, the book closes with a practical look at prevention — what individuals, families, clinicians, and policymakers can realistically do. It is, at its core, a book about awareness without panic and action without fatalism.