Are there numbers by age group? I know of people that wouldn't smoke, but got addicted to nicotine at earlyish ages via vaping.

You misunderstood. I didn't say that e-cigs were, by themselves, higher. I said they may be causing a higher overall use of tobacco (well, nicotine) products.

Health risks are less clear. Vaping hasn't really been around long enough to examine life-long vapers for the really long term effects. Still, based on available evidence, I'd guess the risks are much lower than smoking. But if it converts non-smokers into vapers, that will increase the overall number of people at risk. Of course it can (and does) convert smokers to vapers, which may not reduce the raw number of people doing something risky, but it may decrease the overall pooled risk of that whole population.

So I don't know. From a public health policy point of view, it's not an easy equation to balance. What amount of new people with health risk is worth it to reducing the overall risk? Should there be such a utilitarian calculation? Should they try to reduce both the number of people with risk and the overall risk pool by both banning vaping and making traditional tobacco products harder/more expensive, or more education to prevent initial use? What about freedom to make these not-so-great choices, people make bad but not illegal choices all the time, why should this be different?

I don't propose answers to the above. I'm simply saying the India ban may not purely be a case of moral panic. That's all.

Sure, that is an extremely important consideration. But in the US, smoking has been on the decline. At the rate of decline it could approach nearly 0% in the next 20 years or so. Vaping may reverse that trend, keeping people would have been risk-free in an (albeit lower) risk category, at the same time it converts people who never would have been at risk into a risk category. It's not a simple equation to balance, not when the gains over the short term may work out to be losses in the long term.

I'm not offering this up as "the way it should be", that a ban should be instituted, I offer it up as an important consideration. Personally, I think we might do best by reaching for the best of both worlds-- get rid of flavored vapes the same way we got rid of flavored cigarettes, continue to push traditional smokers into the healthier option, at the same time convert our anti-smoking education & awareness campaigns into ones that include warnings against vaping.