India: Tobacco Panel is Reconstituted

Source from:  Asian Age 09/09/2015

India may have pledged to accelerate hard-hitting measures to reduce tobacco use at the regional committee meeting of South East Asia countries at Timor Leste Monday, but things look grim back home. In a further revelation that endorses that bold pictorial warnings on tobacco products are unlikely to see the light of the day any time soon, the committee on subordinate legislation, which asked the health ministry to defer the warnings and has been looking into it since then, has been reconstituted for one more year till August 2016. Interestingly, no members, including bidi baron Shyam Charan Gupta, have been changed despite the hue and cry about the committee having conflicting interest.

In April, India had deferred its deadline for increasing the size of pictorial warnings on tobacco products to 85 per cent on the suggestion of the parliamentary panel which claimed that the studies in this regard have come from abroad and it was important to consider Indian aspect and hence the notification be put on abeyance.

Meanwhile, the final report of the committee on subordinate legislation (16th Lok Sabha), which is examining the issue as specified in the Cigarettes and Other Tobacco Products (Packaging and Labelling) Amendment Rules, 2014, is yet to be finalised. Six months have passed but there seems to be no hurry. Sources revealed that the committee is yet to meet the health ministry officials to get their view point and the meeting has been rescheduled twice in August. So, far the committee has met other ministries and civil society representatives.

Significantly, even the government has sought the extension of six months to introduce the warnings from the Rajasthan high court, citing that it needs to provide "adequate preparatory time" to the industry to adopt the new health warnings, which clearly means ambitious plan of bolder pictorial warnings unlikely to be introduced in 2015. Tobacco kills 1.3 million people in the SouthEast Asian region every year. Enditem