MUMBAI - Fighting to slay a smoking dragon that kills a
million Indians a year, lawmakers have produced
anti-tobacco legislation that is long on good intention but short
on the necessary specifics to implement it. The new
law forbids smoking on public transport and in public
places such as airports, railway stations, bus
stops, auditoriums, cinemas and stadiums. Tobacco
advertising has also been made illegal.
But a month after the law came into
effect in May, it's business as usual for vendors in
Mumbai. Roadside paan
(betel leaf) shops bountifully stocked with
cigarettes feed smokers continuing to exhale acetone,
arsenic, benzene - just three of more than 3,000 chemicals
in cigarettes that are also used in making nail polish
remover, toilet cleaner, insecticide, rocket fuel, brake
fluid and preservatives for dead bodies.
The
earlier,
much flaunted, tobacco lifestyle-related advertising
has been snuffed by the reality checkers that
won the Indian Cancer Patients Aid Association (CPAA)
a Gold Lion in Cannes, France, last June. "Cancer cures
smoking," said the winning entry. Another entry showed
the Marlboro man's horse keeled over dead from
second-hand tobacco smoke.
The
new law, with its long-winded title - "The
Cigarettes and Other Tobacco Products Prohibition of
Advertisement and Regulation of Trade and Commerce,
Production, Supply and Distribution Act, 2003" - shrinks legal tobacco
advertising down to three-by-two-foot (90-by-60-centimeter) display boards in retail outlets.
Owners of sales outlets too have to
display a 90-by-60cm board at their entrance with
such warnings as "tobacco causes cancer" and "tobacco kills". The
seller must display a 60-by-30cm board saying "sale to
minors is a punishable offence". Sellers are authorized
to demand proof of age. Offenders selling tobacco to
minors will be fined Rs200 (US$4.40).
"The law
is at least a beginning, and it gives us a tool to fight
with," says Alka Kapadia of CPAA, which financially
supports cancer patients' medical treatment and
organizes anti-tobacco campaigns with inputs from
organizations such as PATH Canada, a non-governmental
organization whose goal is to improve health in
developing regions of the world.
"But we
are not sure of implementation of the law," adds
Kapadia. She says she saw three out of four
paan
shops with new
boards warning against the sale of tobacco to minors.
"But when I asked the paanwallahs how they would verify
age, they had no clue."
A Health
Ministry official informed the media with typical
governmental vagueness that these are early days of the ban,
and over a period of time, a monitoring mechanism will be
put in place.
Meanwhile, in Mumbai's Churchgate
Station used by more than 1.8 million suburban railway
commuters daily, a cigarette hoarding from tobacco major
ITC (Indian Tobacco Co) was transformed into an
advertisement for John Players League apparel wear after
May 1.
Such surrogate advertising has long made
use of soft-drink, apple juice and sports apparel to sell
tobacco and alcohol through the media. But the Indian
government has promised litigation to tackle surrogate
advertising as well.
Other countries that ban
tobacco product advertising include Norway, South
Africa, Thailand, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New
Zealand, Finland and Sweden.
The new Indian law
was an outcome of earlier initiatives such as the New
Delhi conference on Global Tobacco Control Law in
January 2000. The New Delhi Declaration from the
conference wanted "the tobacco industry [to] be held
publicly accountable at the national and international
level through legislation, litigation and other means".
The New Delhi Declaration recognized that "4
million people die each year from tobacco-related
diseases and that this number is expected to rise to 10
million deaths per year within the next 25 years, with
70 percent of these deaths occurring in developing
countries".
After the ban, the $7.7 billion
(Rs350 billion) Indian tobacco industry (which pays
about $1.5 billion worth of taxes) has to find other
ways to spend its $55.1 million advertising budget. The
ban is expected to badly sting tobacco companies,
hoarding suppliers, outdoor ad agencies and charity
organizations dependent on tobacco companies for
sponsorship.
According to Indiantelevision.com's
AdEx India analysis, tobacco companies were among the
biggest outdoor advertisers, spending an estimated $134
million in 2003.
Ravi Kiran, managing director
of Starcom India (west/south), and part of Starcom
Worldwide (one of the world's largest media and
marketing companies) told Asia Times Online that print
media will lose about $22.4 million in lost
advertising. Television will lose $7.7 million.
However, "The advertising ban would not make a
significant impact on the advertising business," Ravi
Kiran said. "It makes for less than 2 percent of the
advertising industry's total ad spend of 8,500 crore
[$1.8 billion]. Agencies handling tobacco accounts would
be hit, but even they said they knew it was coming and
were not shocked."
According to the
new law, direct and indirect advertisements for
all tobacco products have been made a cognizable offense.
First-time offenders will get two years in jail and a fine
of Rs1,000, while second-time defaulters can be sentenced
to up to five years and fined Rs5,000.
Other than
cigarettes, India consumes other lethal forms of tobacco
such as gutkha, pan masala, masheri, snuff and
tobacco toothpaste. More than 80 percent of Indian
smokers puff from beedis (rolled tobacco
leaves). Beedi
firms hardly ever advertise.
A leading
Indian anti-tobacco activist, Dr Kalyan Gangwal, has
demanded that tobacco be classified as a narcotic
substance. He says about 4 million Indian children aged
less than 15 years consume tobacco products. The New
Delhi-based South Asian Coalition on Child Labor says
the beedi industry widely uses bonded child labor, with
children forced to roll an average of 1,500
beedis
a day
on daily wages of Rs9 (19 cents).
Shifting its
anti-tobacco war strategy to developing countries, the
World Health Organization (WHO) has begun fighting
tobacco use on economic grounds. The World Bank
estimates that smoking costs the global economy $200
billion a year in health costs and man-hours lost. About
one-third of this financial loss occurs in developing
countries.
WHO launched this year's campaign
for "World No Tobacco Day" on May 31 with the
slogan "Tobacco and poverty: A vicious circle" that stressed
the huge economic bill from tobacco use and cultivation
to families, communities and countries.
"It is
the poor who bear most of the economic loss and disease
burden of tobacco use," says Samlee Plianbangchang,
formerly an adviser to Thailand's Public Health
Ministry, and current regional director of WHO Southeast
Asia.
Releasing a WHO report in New Delhi on May
31, he said, "Tobacco consumption and poverty form a
vicious link." The WHO report said that of the 4.9 million
global deaths every year attributed to tobacco use, 1.1
million are in Southeast Asia. India, Indonesia,
Bangladesh and Thailand are among the top 20 tobacco
producers in the world.
"There has been a
tremendous progress on tobacco control thanks to the
efforts made by many governments and civil society,"
said Dr Lee Jong-wook, director general of WHO. "Every
6.5 seconds one person dies, and many others fall ill or
suffer diseases and disability due to tobacco use. The
world cannot accept such easily preventable human and
economic losses."
Adding life-or-death urgency
to the anti-tobacco war, the latest report from the US
Surgeon General linked smoking to four more serious
diseases and five new cancers: acute myeloid leukemia,
cancers of the cervix, kidney, pancreas and stomach.
Smoking harms nearly every organ of the body,
the May 31 US Surgeon General report said. More evidence
that the anti-tobacco war may logically evolve from
merely banning advertising and smoking in public to
banning the tobacco manufacturing industry altogether.
Raja M is an independent writer based
in Mumbai, India.
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