Bigger Pic Warnings on Ciggies

India chose to hold out implementation of bigger health and fitness warnings on tobacco packing material by way of a years until eventually April 2016, as force adds on New Delhi taking imperative actions to decrease tobacco ingestion which actually eradicates as much as 900,000 people at large annually.

Pictorial health warning on packages of tobacco products will become bigger from April 1 next year.

A notification to this effect was issued by the Health Ministry.

The government was under tremendous pressure to implement large pictorial warnings after Rajasthan High Court asked the government to immediately enforce the new rules.

“Court order implementation is not feasible considering there are existing stocks in the market with old warnings”, said a health ministry official, who declined to be named because he was not authorized to speak to the media.

He said that the Ministry will seek six months as the producers of the products need to make adjustments to their products.

The notification making it mandatory for all tobacco products to carry 85 per cent warnings on their packets instead of the current 40 per cent was first issued in October 2014, but was never carried out as scheduled because the committee for subordinate legislations of the Lok Sabha had suo motu made a decision to look into the matter.

Health activists however allege that this latest offer to implement warnings from April next year is only an excuse to give the tobacco industry and vested interested more time to delay a rollout. The committee is looking into amending the Cigarettes and Other Tobacco Products (Packaging and Labelling) Rules, 2008, to increase the size of pictorial warnings as recommended earlier.

The head of the panel BJP MP Dilip Gandhi had flared up a raging controversy after he said that there were no Indian studies linking tobacco use to cancer.