Govt bows to tobacco lobby, puts off warnings on packs

Aditi Tandon

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, March 31

The Health Ministry today postponed indefinitely the enforcement of tougher anti-tobacco pack warnings it had notified in October last year for implementation from April 1 this year.

The postponement came in the form of a “corrigendum” to the ministry’s October 2014 notification which required the tobacco industry to print pictorial health warnings covering 85 per cent of the product’s package area on both sides from April 1. At present, pack warnings cover only 40 per cent product area on one side allowing retailers to display the other side of the pack to escape the law and its intent.

The corrigendum to the October 15, 2014 notification was published late last night after the Health Ministry decided to honour the interim report of the Parliamentary Committee on Subordinate Legislations headed by BJP MP Dilip Gandhi.

The panel asked the ministry to defer the notification on pack warnings, demanding consultations with tobacco industry workers whose livelihoods, it said, the warnings would harm. The committee’s final report is in the works.

Even as civil society today urged Health Minister JP Nadda not to bow to industry pressure, Nadda said the government was “sticking to its stand on curbing tobacco use and had only deferred the pictorial warnings till the parliamentary committee finalises its report.

“The committee has asked for more time. So, we have held the warnings till it finishes its deliberations. There’s no question of watering down on our anti-tobacco stand,” Nadda said.

The Tribune has learnt that the committee under Gandhi, a BJP MP from Maharashtra’s Ahmednagar, twice asked the ministry to defer the tobacco notification and has held three meetings on the issue since February.

“It is surprising for a committee on subordinate legislations to choose a subject such as this for deliberations. The committee is asking us to hold consultations with stakeholders. However, the anti-tobacco law of India has no provisions for such consultations because the consultations were done when the law was enacted in 2003. We have issued several notifications under the law since then and never faced such a situation,” said sources in the ministry.

The Cigarettes and Other Tobacco Products Act 2003 requires the government to propose harsher anti-tobacco pictorial health warnings every year and allows industry three to six months to comply with those warnings. Thus, the October 15, 2015 notification was to come into force from April 1.

The committee has not only managed to get the notification deferred, but its chairman Dilip Gandhi has also demanded a study on Indians to prove that tobacco leads to cancer — a demand which has shocked the medical fraternity.

The committee has also gone ahead and fixed April 12 for a meeting with ‘bidi’ workers’ groups in Kolkata. The ministry will be represented at that meeting as part of the consultative process with stakeholders as Dilip Gandhi had demanded.

No cancer-tobacco link? 

Dilip Gandhi, Ahmednagar BJP MP and chairman of the Parliamentary Committee on Subordinate Legislations, has demanded a study on Indians to prove that tobacco leads to cancer — a demand which has shocked the medical fraternity

No dilution of stand: Health Minister 

“The parliamentary committee has asked for more time. So, we have held the warnings till it finishes its deliberations. There’s no question of watering down on our anti-tobacco stand,” said JP Nadda, Health Minister