India: Expect Details of Cigarette Content on Packs Soon

Source from:  Business Standard  01/31/2013

In a move that will bring Indian companies on par with their global peers, the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) proposes to make it mandatory for players to disclose the amount of nicotine and tar - two crucial ingredients that go into the making of cigarettes - on packs. FSSAI will soon issue a notification, which will effectively set the ball rolling, officials from the regulatory body told Business Standard.
 
The development is significant as companies in India have been resisting the move for some time now. The reason cited by them is the absence of adequate research facilities that can verify the amount of nicotine and tar going into cigarettes.

The Cigarettes and Other Tobacco Products Act 2003 (also called COTPA), which regulates the trade and commerce as well as advertisement of cigarettes and other tobacco-related products, incidentally, has a provision for declaration of the contents going into a cigarette. But owing to the lack of research laboratories, the government did not notify the rule so far.

"This anomaly will now be corrected," officials at FSSAI said. Six tobacco research laboratories are being set up at the moment in Chandigarh, Gujarat, Noida, Ghaziabad, Chennai and Kolkata at a total cost of Rs 57 crore, officials said. These labs will be established with support from the World Health Organisation (WHO), they added.

While the Tobacco Institute of India, an industry body, did not respond to a mail sent to it on the matter, healthy industry officials say that the reason for the resistance by manufacturers is also due to the impact on business when consumers see the amount of nicotine and tar that goes into a brand of cigarette.
 
Nicotine is what drives a smoker to go back for a fag repeatedly owing to its addictive nature. Tar, on the other hand, is a carcinogen. Health industry experts say that the amount of nicotine and tar in Indian cigarettes is above the global permissible level of 1 milligram and 10 milligram per stick. Indian cigarettes contain about 13-14 milligram of tar and 1.3 to 1.8 milligram of nicotine in them.

Healthy industry experts as well as activists say that besides putting in place the machinery to gauge the amount of nicotine and tar going into cigarettes in India, the FSSAI will also have to determine the quantum, which has not been mandated by law. "Once that is done, it will go a long way in streamlining the process," says Monika Arora, Head, Health Promotion and Tobacco Control at the New Delhi-based Public Health Foundation of India.

At the moment, Indian manufacturers have graphic as well as text warnings such as Smoking Kills and Tobacco Causes Cancer on packs to alert consumers of the ill-effects of smoking. The move to disclose the contents of a cigarette  is the next step, says Arora, to wean smokers away from the habit by drawing their attention to the ingredients that go into it.
 
India ranks second with a total of 274.9 million tobacco users in the world after China, which has 300.8 million, according to a study by the Lancet, a medical journal, released last year. While the study did not indicate the number of smokers in India or China, it did say that almost 34 per cent Indians above the age of 15 either smoke or chew tobacco.

Health industry experts, incidentally, have been advocating harsher rules to check the growing incidence of tobacco consumption in the country such as indicating the emission levels of carbon monoxide, which is released when a user takes a smoke. Enditem