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Pictorial warnings on cigarette packets recently introduced by the government are about to be phased out, reports say. It is its a clear attempt to safe guard the interest of the people involved in the tobacco industry and to keep the governmen'ts crucial vote bank intact.
Initially, there were some gruesome pictures that depicted the worse possible effects of tobacco on the human body. These pictures were first notified by the Health Ministry in July 2006 as pictorial warnings for cigarette and gutka packets. But these pictures were shot down by the Group of Ministers (GoM) as 'objectionable'.
Former Union Labour Minister, Oscar Fernandes said, "If we're talking about making the pictures harsher, we may as well shut down the industry. There are several districts in West Bengal where poor bidi workers earn their livelihood from this."
In a meeting of the GoM chaired by Pranab Mukherjee in July 2007, it was decided that the picture of the dead body be replaced with a 'suitable' one.
The minutes of the meeting available with CNN-IBN show that in the GoM, Pranab Mukharjee said, "A number of representations have been received from the bidi industry that employs a large number of workers from the weaker sections of society. The basic issues raised by the bidi industry relate to the size, colour and obnoxious nature of the pictorial warnings. Keeping this is view, the pictorial warnings may be modified."
The GOM also asked the Health Ministry to consult the Ministry of Law and remove the 'skull and cross bone' as a warning sign.
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Anti-smoking groups welcome the introduction of graphic warnings on cigarette packs and other tobacco products but are sceptical they can have much of an effect on the country's 300 million tobacco users, more than half of whom live in the countryside.
The warnings, which show photos of decayed gums and diseased lungs as well as a skull and crossbones, were supposed to be in place in November but were delayed after lobbying by tobacco manufacturers.
However, last month, the Supreme Court stepped in and set a cut-off date of May 31 after which all packs of cigarettes, beedis (hand-rolled cigarettes) and gutka (a kind of chewing tobacco that also includes crushed betel nut) must carry pictorial warnings taking up about 40 per cent of the packaging area.
Anti-tobacco groups alleged that the government wanted to delay implementing the rules until after the just-completed general elections.
Yet, more than one week after the ruling and almost three weeks after the elections, the new cigarette packs have yet to make an appearance on store shelves.
HYDERABAD: Beedi workers' unions in the State are up in arms again with the Supreme Court clearing the Central government law making it mandatory to display pictorial warnings on tobacco packs from May 31.
Consequent to the implementation of Section 7 of the Cigarettes and Other Tobacco Products (Prohibition of Advertisement and Regulation of Trade and Commerce, Production, Supply and Distribution) Act, 2003, it will be compulsory to depict lungs for smoking forms of tobacco packages and scorpion for chewing and smokeless forms. . . .
M. Sirajuddin, president of All-India Beedi, Cigarette and Tobacco Workers Federation said the direction would cripple the beedi industry. Women who formed the bulk of the beedi workers were already feeling the pinch of insecurity said S. Rama, general secretary of AP Beedi and Cigar Workers Union. Two women beedi workers had already ended their lives in Nizamabad and Medak district, perturbed over their future.
Thousands of street children in Mumbai spend more on tobacco than on food every day, according to a survey of their economic conditions and tobacco consumption.
"Street children spend far more on tobacco than on nutritious food. These children spend more each month on naswar (snuff), mava, gutka (both forms of chewing tobacco) and cigarettes than on meat, almost as much for khaini (powdered tobacco) as for milk, and more for all forms of tobacco except masheri (tobacco paste) than on fruit or eggs," said the survey 'Choosing Tobacco over Food: Daily Struggles for Existence among the Street Children of Mumbai'.
The survey, conducted by Shelter Don Bosco - a Mumbai-based NGO working with street children, is part of a report 'Tobacco and Poverty: Observations from India and Bangladesh', distributed on the third day of the 14th World Conference on Tobacco or Health here.
"Tobacco use is an integral part of life for street children in Mumbai. They start by picking up discarded butts from cigarettes and beedis (small hand rolled cigars), then quickly move on to purchasing tobacco and spending significant sums of their meagre incomes on it. The children also report an array of health effects from tobacco use," the survey said.
A significant finding was that close to half (46.8 percent) of the children in the study sample use gutka and 39.5 percent smoke beedis.
"My mother was a beedi worker and my three sisters were beedi workers. From childhood I've been watching their sorry plight; call it TB, cancer, asthma, I've seen it all. When my mother coughed up blood, it used to fill a vessel; she would always say these women require better and cleaner housing," recalls Narsayya Adam, a third-time CPI(M) MLA from Solapur city in Maharashtra.
That was 40 years ago. But when he was first elected MLA in 1978, he took on the mission of organising and improving the lives of Solapur's beedi workers. "They lived in small, cramped huts with no ventilation and open gutters. I dreamt of giving them good homes with better ventilation."
With a background of participation in the mazdoor andolan, he first raised the voice of Solapur's 65,000-odd beedi workers in the State Assembly in 1978, and with support in Delhi cutting across party lines, in 1985, about 3,000 houses were built by the Maharashtra Housing and Area Development Authority, each costing Rs 22,000. The State and Central governments contributed Rs 5,000 each and the remaining came from the workers. "But they couldn't repay the money they had borrowed and the interest piled up," says Adam, known as 'Adam Master' as he once worked as a teacher. . . .
Archana is 11, just back from school and, still in her school uniform, helps her mother in tying up the rolled beedis. When you ask the little girl what she wants to become when she grows up, her grandma intervenes: "What is the use of educating her? People like us don't get jobs in fancy offices; for us beedis is our livelihood." But Archana wants to become a teacher.
"Now I'm waging a battle to get them below poverty line (BPL) cards; once they get those cards they will get 20 kg wheat and 15 kg rice every month. That will be a big help for beedi workers."
He says 60 per cent of Solapur's 65,000 beedi workers are Telugu-speaking, and there are many Muslim women too in this vocation. . . .
But he has read the writing on the wall. "The biggest question before us is the Anti-tobacco Bill of 2003 which aims to slowly kill this business. This is a 5,000-year old sanskriti; but if you put skulls and skeletons on the packet, how will people buy it? Our research shows that cigarette is much more harmful; smoking 20 beedis is like smoking one cigarette."
A whopping 75% cent of about 44 lakh 'beedi' workers in the country suffer from multiple illnesses due to continuous exposure to tobacco and other hazardous substances, a study by an NGO has claimed.
The study conducted by the 'Voluntary Health Association of India (VHAI)' claimed that workers spent atleast 12 hours rolling beedis and faced the risks of contracting TB and developing chronic bronchitis, asthma, skin and spinal problems among others.
The study titled 'Caught in a Death Trap' involved a sample of over 1,000 workers of Anand district in Gujarat and Murshidabad in West Bengal.
The survey also claimed that almost all workers worked under "dehumanising conditions" as the industry openly "flouted" provisions of labour laws.
Smokers of rolled tobacco are nearly four times more likely to develop lung cancer than non-smokers, researchers from India report.
Smoking "bidis" -- dried tobacco rolled in locally grown leaves -- is the most popular form of tobacco use among males in the southern Indian province of Kerala, Dr. Padmavathy Amma Jayalekshmy and colleagues write in September issue of International Journal of Cancer. . . .
"Mainstream smoke of bidi contains a much higher concentration of carcinogenic hydrocarbons such as benzanthracene and benzopyrene than US cigarettes," the researchers explain. Moreover, average bidi smokers take over five puffs per minute as compared to two puffs per minute among cigarette smokers.
"From the point of view of preventing cancer associated with smoking, whether smoking bidis or cigarettes may not be important since bidi smoking is at least as hazardous as cigarette smoking," they conclude. "Immediate measures should be taken to stop bidi smoking."
While the government is trying out various methods, including a hefty tax levy to make smokers give up smoking or cough up more, tobacco lovers are turning to cheaper options to 'puff away their blues'.
Trends indicate that smokers hit by the rising prices have shifted to so called down market options like bidis and Gutkas, as heavy tax slabs have failed to kill their urge to smoke resulting in an increase in total tobacco consumption.
"High rates of taxation on cigarettes are forcing consumers to shift to cheaper and alternate forms of tobacco consumption. As a result, overall tobacco consumption is increasing, as the price of other tobacco products is very low," says Udayan Lal, Director, Tobacco Institute of India (TII).
The bidi export market is seeing a downward trend and confusion prevails among bidi exporters about the actual figures. But exporters present a unanimous front on the reasons for the fall. The restrictions on tobacco the world over are seen as the chief reason for the exporters' woes.
Low-cost cigarettes seem to be the other villains. Bidi exporters are slowly losing hold over the Middle East, which has been the mainstay for many companies, like Nimex Trading Corporation. “The Middle East accounts for about 90% of our exports,” says Nimex proprietor Parvez A Khatri. The Asian population in these countries constitutes the major clientele for bidis. However, cigarette manufacturers in Bangladesh who are supplying their wares at cheap rates, are beginning to eat into their markets.
More than 100 million people in India smoke unfiltered hand-rolled cigarettes, reducing their life span by about two decades, a study released Thursday said.
More Indians die from smoking "bidis" than from all other forms of tobacco combined, said the study by the Healis-Sekhsaria Institute of Public Health, dedicated to improving public health in India and other developing countries.
"Indians smoke eight times as many bidis as cigarettes" thanks to their affordability, said the study, released by the Mumbai-based group ahead of World-Tobacco Day on Saturday.
"Bidis are as harmful as cigarettes if not more... bidi smoke delivers many toxic chemicals at higher levels than those from western-style cigarettes," it said adding that some 800 billion bidis were sold in India annually.
Packed with "proven carcinogens, poison, toxic chemicals and nicotine" bidi smoke raises "the risk of oral cancer, cancer of the lung, stomach and esophagus, heart disease, chronic lung disease, asthma and tuberculosis," the study said.
the Union ministry of health and family welfare (MOHFW) manages to hit the bull’s eye. Carrying on with its “No tobacco, No Alcohol” agenda with the avowed objective to free society from the shackles of these age-old addictions, the ministry has now gone one step further by coming out with a monograph that seeks to bring all the ill effects of bidi smoking into sharp focus. An estimated 100 million people ~ mostly the poor and the illiterate ~ smoke bidi in India and 200,000 tuberculosis deaths are due to these hand-rolled cigarettes, a health ministry report says. The monograph has data, culled from various sources for 2000-2004, to prove that bidi smoking is more harmful than cigarette smoking, the health secretary Mr Naresh Dayal notes.
Tobacco cultivation in seven southwestern districts which got a big boost several years ago is declining due to awareness about its harmful effect on soil and health following protests and campaign and also because of farmers' need to grow more food.
Farmers now say its cultivation decreases fertility and deposits harmful ingredients in soil.
According to sources in the Department of Agricultural Extension (DAE) and officials of now defunct Tobacco Development Board (TDB), tobacco cultivation declined to 14000 hectares in the areas in the current season from last year's 17000 hectares. .. .
The seven districts known for tobacco cultivation are Kushtia, Meherpur, Jhenidah, Chuadanga, Magura, Jessore and Rajbari.
Tobacco cultivation increased in the country mainly at the behwest of cigarette and Bidi companies. Its main buyers were 17 companies including multinational British American Tobacco (BAT. . . .
According to sources, Bidi and cigarette companies have been using various 'unhealthy' techniques to lure farmers into tobacco farming for long. They provide interest-free loans, seeds, fertilisers, technical support and buy back facilities to farmers.
These companies have a large number of field workers to do the job. They lure farmers into tobacco cultivation, and get 'tips' from companies for 'good performance'.
The I&B ministry appears unwilling to display the controversial 'skull and crossbones' pictoral warning on tobacco products and has sought four weeks' time to develop alternative designs.
The issue, discussed by the Group of Ministers (GoM) on Wednesday, remained inconclusive. I&B minister Priya Ranjan Dasmunsi made a presentation to the ministers suggesting that an alternative warning design be created.
"The ministry is of the view that some other designs could be prepared by the Department of Audio-Visual Publicity (DAVP) and put before the GoM for their consideration within four weeks," Dasmunsi said. . . .
the issue remains a nettled one as bidi workers and those working in tobacco related trades constitute a powerful vote bank, one that political leaders are loath to upset. The GoM is likely to meet again to resolve the issue.
Starting June 1, all cigarette, bidi and gutkha packets will carry prominent pictorial health warnings. The move isn't coming a day too soon - official statistics show every second man and every seventh woman in India is a tobacco-user.
"In our country, 46.5 per cent men and 13.8 per cent women use tobacco, which causes 40 per cent of all cancers," Health Minister Anbumani Ramadoss told HT.
"To encourage people to quit tobacco, all cigarette, bidi and gutkha packs will carry pictorial health warnings from June 1. We need graphic warnings,because many tobacco users are illiterate and cannot read the health warning," Ramadoss said.
Scores of workers involved in the making of beedi, a cheap cigarette substitute, are on an indefinite strike against government directives to print warning symbols on beedi packets.
Poor and impoverished workers, most of whom are women, say the ban on smoking in public places has already crippled the tobacco industry and following the directives would add to their woes.
"The Central Government's direction will cost us heavy. No one will come to buy the beedis. This is my only profession. I will be completely ruined if I have to leave this. We as it is earn a meager amount. So, the government should pay heed to our demands and withdraw the order," said Meeral, a worker.