Johnson & Johnson has agreed to pay up to 5.5 billion dollars to settle tens of thousands of lawsuits in the United States. The lawsuits claimed its talc based baby powder caused ovarian cancer. The settlement covers roughly 76,000 claims and needs sign off from at least 95 percent of claimants before it becomes final.
You are probably wondering if this affects you here in India. Short answer, no. Here is why, and here is the fuller picture on asbestos itself that most coverage is skipping.
It started with one word: asbestos.
The story begins in 2019 in the United States. A lab contracted by the FDA found asbestos in one bottle of Johnson’s Baby Powder, the first time American regulators had ever announced such a finding in the product. That single result triggered a recall of 33,000 bottles.
SO WHAT ACTUALLY IS ASBESTOS?
Asbestos is not one mineral. It is a group of six naturally occurring silicate minerals, mined from the earth, that share one property, they separate into fine, durable fibres.
For most of the twentieth century, that made asbestos a prized industrial material. It resists heat, does not burn, does not conduct electricity, and is cheap. That is why it ended up in roofing, pipes, brake pads, insulation and, at one point, cosmetic talc.
The danger is in the fibres themselves. When inhaled, they are small enough to lodge deep in the lungs and stay there for decades. Over time, they can trigger scarring, known as asbestosis, and cancers including mesothelioma and lung cancer.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) classifies all forms of asbestos as carcinogenic to humans, and says there is no known safe threshold of exposure. Symptoms typically take fifteen to forty years to show up, which is part of why science took so long to catch up with the exposure.
Here is the connection to baby powder specifically. Talc, the mineral in baby powder, is a completely different mineral from asbestos. But talc and asbestos often form in the same geological seams underground.
So when talc is mined, there is a real risk of cross contamination if the mining is not carefully controlled and tested. That is the entire basis of the American lawsuits, not that talc itself is asbestos, but that some talc supplies may not have been properly screened.
WHERE INDIA FITS INTO THE ASBESTOS STORY?
The answer is well beyond baby powder?
This is the part that usually gets left out. Asbestos is not some rare industrial relic in India. It is embedded in the country’s building materials supply chain.
India banned the mining of asbestos back in 1993. But it never banned the use or import of asbestos.
That distinction matters. India is the world’s largest importer of asbestos products, using it commonly in cement pipes, roofing sheets and brake linings. Most of what comes in is chrysotile, or white asbestos, imported mainly from Russia and Kazakhstan.
The reason it persists is straightforwardly economic. Asbestos cement roofing sheets are significantly cheaper than the alternatives, and rural affordable housing depends heavily on them. There is also an entrenched domestic industry and workforce built around it, which is part of why successive governments have resisted a full ban.
In 2022, the Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change told Parliament there was no proposal to prohibit the use of asbestos in the country, even though the government’s own notification under the Mines Act recognises asbestosis and mesothelioma as diseases caused by asbestos exposure.
This came to a head again recently. In November 2025, hearing a case about asbestos cement roofing in schools, the National Green Tribunal declined to impose a blanket ban, citing the absence of conclusive scientific evidence directly linking the sheets to health harm under normal use conditions.
The Tribunal said an order for immediate discontinuance or replacement across the country was not warranted at this stage, though it did direct the environment ministry to frame safety protocols for handling and disposal, and to issue advisories to schools on maintaining existing asbestos roofs safely.
There has been movement in specific pockets though. Indian Railways has completed the phase out of asbestos roofing from all its stations nationwide, a direct response to long-running concerns about exposure for the crores of people who pass through those platforms every day.
So while J&J’s baby powder is the story making global headlines, asbestos as a material is a far bigger and more unresolved question in India, sitting quietly in the roof over your head or the pipe carrying your water, not just on a supermarket shelf.
– Ends
