Tobacco products to get new pictorial warnings
The health ministry is developing a new set of pictorial warnings for tobacco products to be put in place from next year. This move came after the ministry was flooded with complaints that the current warnings were ineffective.
Tobacco manufacturers print the pictorial warning in such a way that they don’t cover 40 per cent area of the pack as mandated in the tobacco control law.
The content of the warning is also not visible in most cases and a few products don’t print the warnings at all, said B. K. Prasad, health ministry official incharge of tobacco control measures.
All these are serious violations of the law and concerned government agencies have been told to take action.
” We received a lot of complaints about the way warnings are being printed on tobacco packs and we have taken a serious view of it,” said Prasad, while talking on the sidelines of a the World Health Organization ( WHO) conference on the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control.
A WHO official said warnings on cigarette packets hardly depict a pair of lungs diseased by tobacco smoke. ” It looks more like an image of a person wearing an oversized tie, minus the head,” he said.
In the case of chewing tobacco packs – which carry the picture of a scorpion – the makers are misleading people by informally projecting it as a government ” seal of quality”. Besides pictorial warnings on tobacco products and ban on smoking in public places – which are measures to cut the demand of tobacco products – the government also initiated steps to address the supply side as well, Prasad said.
Programmes have been launched to wean tobacco farmers away from growing tobacco and to offer alternative livelihood to people engaged in bidi rolling.
At present, nearly five million people are engaged in the bidi industry.
“The tobacco lobby has used tobacco farmers and bidi workers – to stall many steps to curb the menace in the country,” minister of state for health Dinesh Trivedi at the conference.
“Overcoming pressure from this lobby is a big challenge for tobacco control in India.”
Courtesy: Mail Today
