Ban tobacco
Over 27 per cent of tobacco consumers in India fall
in the 15-24 year age bracket. The addition of new customers every year even as
thousands of patrons die annually ensures that the tobacco companies’ customer
base remains wide and tall. If the global tobacco-related mortality is about
5.5 million people annually, India’s burden alone is nearly one million. India is the second largest consumer of
tobacco products in the world.
The Central government should simultaneously
implement multiple strategies to prevent people, particularly children as young
as 15 years, from getting addicted to nicotine and help the existing users to
quit smoking and/or chewing tobacco. Is raising taxes really the most effective
way of achieving it? It is indeed heartening that the new Union Health Minister supports
higher taxes on cigarettes and tobacco products; But India follows a bizarre, producer-friendly excise duty structure
for cigarettes, beedis and chewing tobacco that makes a mockery of taxation.
Food Safety and Standards (Prohibition and
Restrictions on Sales) Regulations, 2011 dated 1st August 2011, prohibits the
manufacture and sale of any food product containing tobacco and nicotine. Why
these regulations are not being followed? Why the question of imposing higher
taxes on the production of tobacco in any form is coming into the scenario,
when the regulations actually aim a complete ban of tobacco?
Raising the taxes on tobacco products is not at all
a remedy. People are ready to buy it at any cost. If the central and state
governments are indeed serious about the issue of public health, they should
come forward to ban the tobacco consumption completely despite the fact that it
leads to revenue loss.
Why India can not be smoke free. What is that stops the
government to set the timeline to help the workers of tobacco industries to
find the alternative ways for their sustenance and to announce "smoke free
India"? Why this drama of allowing the industries to produce cigarettes
and warn the people not to smoke? It is like swinging the cradle and pinching
the kid.
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