Dinesh Kamath's Editorial 'Ban tobacco' that was published in Newsband

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 cannot 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.