Here is the proof

Parliamentary panel unaware of Indian studies on tobacco link to cancer

Even as India was preparing to host the South Asian health ministers’ meeting on April 8, 2015, it was embroiled in a health controversy that was as farcical as it was shocking. The central government halted the decision to increase the size of pictorial warnings on tobacco products (scheduled for 1 April) after the Parliamentary Committee on Subordinate Legislation examining the provisions of the Cigarettes and Other Tobacco Products Act, 2003 said the government should look more carefully at the case for health warnings before going ahead.

Two members of the committee from the BJP made strong statements that would have been worthy of the most devout lobbyists of the tobacco industry. Shyama Charan Gupta, is also known as the “bidi baron” of eastern Uttar Pradesh and the chairperson of the committee, Dilip Gandhi, insisted that all surveys and studies linking cancer to tobacco were done abroad and there was no such “Indian study.”

It was surprising that a parliamentary committee on such a subject was unaware of the many studies which established the link between tobacco consumption and cancer, and other illnesses. Among these studies is the comprehensive “Report on Tobacco Control in India” brought out by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW) in 2004.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi stepped in to direct the ministry to increase the pictorial warning on tobacco packs to 65% of the packet’s area when it became obvious that the statements were proving to be a political embarrassment. However, this was a “compromise” between the earlier planned increase to 85% (60% pictures and 25% text) of the packet area to be covered by warnings and the existing 40% area.

Interestingly, the Rajya Sabha committee on subordinate legislation examining the same issue in 2013 had recommended that the pictorial warning should be increased to an area of 90% of the tobacco product. India is one of the signatories to the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) since 2003.

In May 2014, the centre released the “Economic Burden of Tobacco Related Diseases in India” report collated by the Public Health Foundation of India and supported by the MoHFW and the WHO country office for India. It calculated the costs, direct and indirect, due to diseases caused by tobacco use in 2011 at Rs 1,04,500 crore a year.

This was about 12% more than the combined central and state governments’ expenditure on healthcare that year. In India, manufacturers of gutkha and zarda (chewable tobacco products) and bidis consistently proclaim that their products are “less harmful” than cigarettes, though studies on the massive incidence of oral cancers here indicate otherwise.

The chairperson of the parliamentary committee also went on to point out that four crore people are employed in the bidi-making and tendu patta industry. Unsurprisingly, the previous government too had dithered over the introduction of pictorial warnings on tobacco products and on discouraging tobacco cultivation.