File photo: Prime Minister Narendra Modi
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has reportedly asked Health Minister JP Nadda to go ahead with enforcing larger pictorial warnings on cigarette packets after a parliamentary committee said the move should be delayed because there is no local evidence that smoking causes cancer.
The PM, sources said, wants to send a clear message that his government is not caving under pressure from the tobacco lobby. The government is likely to ask for health warnings that cover 60-65 percent of a cigarette packet. Last year, the Health Minister had said starting April 1, 85 percent of packaging would carry a depiction of the damage done by smoking.
That move was delayed this week after the parliamentary committee said there are no credible Indian studies to correlate smoking and cancer; some members said India must not succumb to "foreign pressure."
A member of the committee is
beedi baron and BJP lawmaker SC Gupta whose empire of hand-rolled cigarettes is worth hundreds of crores. Mr Gupta likened tobacco to sugar, which, he said, is not banned despite causing diabetes.
At a BJP conclave in Bengaluru being attended by the PM and other top leaders, Mr Modi has reportedly said that parliamentary committees must not include members who could have a conflict of interest with the matters they are reviewing.
Members of the parliamentary committee looking at the proposed tobacco curbs say that hundreds of thousands of people will lose their livelihood if strict measures are introduced against the tobacco industry.
Some say far more Indians use beedis or hand-rolled cigarettes and that 16 percent of smokers use cigarettes.
Up to 900,000 Indians die every year from causes related to tobacco use, the government has said. India will record 1.5 million tobacco-related deaths annually by 2020, according to estimates by the International Tobacco Control Project.