Close to the Ganges River, which flows through India’s holy city of Varanasi in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, Janaki Devi is a textbook example of poor, working women who turn the wheels of one of India's most important industries.

Every morning she bathes in the river Hindus consider their holiest landmark. This is as restful as it gets for Devi; it’s just before she starts a grueling, eight-hour routine of filling reddish brown tendu leaves with 2 grams of tobacco flakes, then tying them with thread. Completing a bidi every 25 seconds, each day she must roll at least 1,000. For this, she earns $1 a day.

"I work without a break. I need the money to sustain my family,” says Devi, eyes focused on a large cane tray on her lap where she works. She earns $25 a month. That wage is low, even in India, where more than half of the population lives on an average of less than $2 a day.

Devi is among the roughly six million women who roll bidis in India; their arduous profession is the second-largest labor-intensive occupation in the world’s second-largest tobacco market – a country where a quarter of the population is said to be addicted to various forms of tobacco. Women constitute almost 75 percent of the total bidi workforce, which yields between 750 billion to 1.2 trillion sticks every year.

The bidi, which resembles a small marijuana cigarette, poses a big health risk for smokers and rollers. It contains more nicotine and tar than conventional cigarettes.

But the industry rides on a wave of significant political clout fueled by revenue of up to $20 billion annually, according to conservative estimates. In fact, in the global struggle to check tobacco consumption – the world’s leading preventable cause of death – India has been a losing proposition for public health advocates because of the bidi industry’s political influence and marketing muscle.

In post-Soviet Russia, the right connections can mean success in business. And in the country’s lucrative retail tobacco trade, Igor Kesaev has set a new standard for success.

Kesaev runs the multifaceted Mercury Group, with interests in everything from weapons manufacturing to real estate. Now he’s also Russia’s cigarette king, with an unprecedented 70-percent share of the distribution business, selling the popular brands of some of the world’s largest tobacco companies, Philip Morris International, Imperial Tobacco and Japan Tobacco International.

Last fall Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin outlined a new policy for reducing smoking: tobacco advertising will be totally prohibited in 2012; there will be no smoking inside some public buildings and on public transportation; and by 2015, excise taxes can go up 10 times the current levels. This, the government has said, helps Russia comply with the World Health Organization’s international treaty on tobacco control. But ties Kesaev has forged with key government agencies, through strategic charitable contributions, have Russian anti-tobacco activists and government transparency advocates skeptical that they can win meaningful smoking reforms and curb government spending on tobacco-related death and disease.

Dmitry Yanin, head of the Confederation of Consumer Associations, which promotes tobacco-control policy, said the relationships between cigarette distributors like Kesaev and Russia’s security services weaken tobacco reform efforts in Russia.

The country today “is profitable for tobacco business — distributors, producers — but not for reducing the number of smokers,” Yanin said.