Tag: India

Limiting contacts in India
The Health Department of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu is setting up an empowered panel to implement measures recommended by the World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC), according to a story in the latest issue of the BBM Bommidala Group newsletter.
The panel will be focusing in particular on dealing with interactions with, or any kind of interference from, representatives of the tobacco industry.
The panel will reportedly comprise secretaries with the state government’s ‘Health, Home, Finance, Commercial tax, Registration and Law departments.
The Tamil Nadu government has already issued a protocol for its employees in dealing with the tobacco industry.
The protocol limits their interactions with tobacco-industry representatives and forbids them from accepting from the industry any contributions or services for themselves or their families, relatives or friends, including funds for research, policy drafts or legal advice.
Meetings between government employees and representatives of the tobacco industry must be cleared with the panel in writing.
December 12, 2017
Tobacco use down in India
Tobacco use in India has dropped by six percentage points in under 10 years, according to a story in the New Indian Express.
Figures from the Global Adult Tobacco Survey, 2016-2017, indicate that tobacco use fell in India from 34.6 percent to 28.6 percent between 2009-10 and 2016-17.
Three North-eastern states, Assam, Tripura and Manipur, however, saw increases in tobacco use despite anti-tobacco laws and a ban enforced by militants, the Express story said. In Assam, tobacco use rose from 39.3 percent to 48.2 percent, while in in Tripura it increased from 55.9 percent to 64.5 percent, and in Manipur it went up from 54.1 percent to 55.1 percent.
India’s other states saw falls in tobacco use. In Nagaland, it fell from 31.5 percent to 13.2 percent, and in Sikkim, it fell from 41.6 percent to 17.9 percent.
Meanwhile, smoking prevalence in India has fallen from 14 percent to 10.7 percent.
And the chewing of smokeless tobacco (SLT) has gone down from 25.9 percent to 21.4 percent nationally.
‘The remarkable achievement has been in reduction in exposure to second-hand smoke at home, which is from 52.3 percent to 38.7 percent, and in any public place from 29 per cent to 23 percent,’ the report said.
November 27, 2017
India wants an end to ENDS
India’s Union health ministry is planning to issue an advisory note to all states about what it sees as the health risks of vaping, according to a story on indianexpress.com.
The story said the note was likely to say that products such as ‘e-cigarettes, electronic nicotine-delivery systems (ENDS), nicotine and flavoured hookah’ were ‘extremely harmful to health’ and that they had not been approved in any form by the ministry of health and family welfare.
“The public will be advised, in their own interest, not to use any such products, sold or marketed in any form and under any name or brand,” a senior ministry official said.
But, according to a senior health ministry official, the health ministry is in a quandary over whether to ban e-cigarettes under the Cigarettes and Other Tobacco Products Act (COTPA), the Drugs and Cosmetics Act, 1940, or the Poisons Act 1919.
Some states, including Punjab, Chandigarh, Haryana, Kerala, Mizoram, Karnataka, and Jammu and Kashmir have already banned e-cigarettes as an unapproved drug. While some of these states have banned e-cigarettes under the Drugs and Cosmetics Act, some have used as well the Poisons Act.
And, just for good measure, the official said that nicotine had been declared a ‘lethal and hazardous’ substance under the Environment (Protection) Act and Insecticide Act.
In 2013, the Ministry of Health formed an expert group to assess and report on various forms of ENDs, which, in its final report in July said that scientific evidence clearly indicated that any form of nicotine use, or the use of ENDS, was hazardous. The group reportedly said, too, that, ‘besides, causing many forms of health disorders, nicotine is also classified as a poison and is fatal for human beings even in small dosage’.
Meanwhile, the Express reported that three sub-committees formed to examine the legal, advocacy and health aspects of e-cigarettes had strongly recommended a ban on them, stating that they had cancer-causing properties.
“Though companies claim that e-cigarettes help [smokers] give up smoking, but in reality they help initiate cigarette smoking as they deliver nicotine in an attractive way and attract youth,” the official said.
November 23, 2017
Smokeless ban struck down
The Gauhati High Court has struck down the Assam Health Act of 2013, which had sought to ban all forms of smokeless tobacco, according to a story in the Telegraph relayed by the TMA.
The Assam Health Act of 2013 prohibited the manufacturing, advertisement, trade, storage, distribution, sale and consumption of products such as zarda, gutkha and pan masala containing tobacco and nicotine.
And according to the report, it contained a provision requiring that all violators serve a minimum three-year prison sentence.
The court ruled that it was beyond the powers of the state legislature to pass this law because that power resided only with the national parliament.
Senior additional advocate-general Devjit Saikia confirmed that the act had been set aside but could not give details because the order will be received only on Monday.
November 1, 2017
Tobacco losing out in India
Some farmers in India are exploring the possibility of moving from tobacco to alternative crops, according to a story in the latest issue of the BBM Bommidala Group newsletter.
Farmers in the traditional tobacco-growing areas of the Prakasam district of Andhra Pradesh are said to be exploring the possibility of switching from tobacco to crops such as Bengal gram.
Mechanization has made growing Bengal gram relatively easy and farmers are being attracted to this crop by what are described as ‘attractive’ prices.
The situation is such that the Indian Tobacco Association (ITA) is expecting a decline in tobacco yields in the district.
Meanwhile, the Tobacco Board of India and bankers are planning to assist tobacco growers with ‘farmer-friendly’ initiatives. The board has increased the crop size by two million kg to 86 million kg in the regions under the Southern Black Soil (SBS) and Southern Light Soil (SLS) auction platforms, and the leading bank in the district has increased the amount of loan assistance on offer from Rs350,000 per barn to Rs400,000 per barn.
However, the ITA believes that the combined crop in the SBS and SLS regions could be 70-75 million kg against the authorized crop size of 86 million kg.
October 10, 2017
Flue-cured prices up sharply
The average price paid to farmers for flue-cured tobacco grown in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh stood at Rs134.06 per kg on Friday, 14.3 percent up on the average price paid for the same volume of tobacco during the previous season, according to a story in the latest issue of the BBM Bommidala Group newsletter.
By Friday, 137 days into the 2017 sales season, farmers had marketed 101.75 million kg of flue-cured from a crop estimated at just in excess of 104 million kg. Sales are in the final phase with auction floors closed in all districts but that of West Godavari.
At the same time, flue-cured tobacco auctions in the state of Karnataka, which started in the Periyapatna and Mysore regions on September 8, are picking up.
Leaf production is estimated to have reached 103.5 million kg this year and initial reports from the auction floors indicate that flue-cured is fetching better prices than it did last year across all grades.
Prices for low-grade tobacco is said to have risen by Rs30 per kg.
The early average price stood at Rs150.38 per kg, up from last year’s Rs142.62 per kg.
September 27, 2017
Cigarette butts a resource
Cigarette butts can be turned into a resource for killing mosquitoes, according to a story in the Economic Times of India citing a new study by an international team of scientists.
This method of pest control was described in the latest issue of the journal Environmental Science and Pollution Research.
The report said: ‘A single treatment with CB [cigarette butt] extracts and silver nanostructures – synthesized using the extract – significantly reduced egg hatchability of anopheles stephensi, the mosquito species that spreads the P.falciparum malaria parasite’.
Low doses of the silver nanostructures were said also to inhibit the growth of a soil bacteria, Bacillus subtilis, the organism, Klebsiella pneumoniae, that causes pneumonia, and Salmonella typhi, that causes typhoid.
Normally, the larvae of malaria mosquitoes are eaten while in water by their predators, small crustaceans called M. aspericornis, and, according to the researchers, the predation efficiency of these crustaceans is not affected by the introduction of CB-synthesized nanoparticles.
Meanwhile, smoke toxicity experiments conducted with adult mosquitoes showed that the use of CB-based mosquito coils led to mortality rates comparable to those obtained with the use of standard coils containing the pesticide permethrin.
The research was carried about by scientists in India, Italy, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia and Taiwan.
September 26, 2017
Tobacco travel ban
In, Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh, India, the Lucknow Metro Rail Corporation has decided to frisk all passengers at the entry points of stations from next week to prevent them from carrying tobacco products onto trains, according to a story in The Times of India.
The decision to frisk passengers was made apparently because requests to passengers to surrender tobacco products and paan before entering stations had been ignored, and because instances of littering and spitting inside Metro stations were ‘showing no signs of abating’.
Notices will be deployed at frisking points informing passengers that tobacco products are prohibited items within Metro premises.
September 19, 2017
Bans counter-productive
Banning electronic cigarettes could deprive Indian smokers of a substantially-less-harmful alternative to traditional tobacco-cigarettes and cause adverse public-health consequences, according to an Indo-Asian News Service (IANS) story.
Some states in India, including Jammu and Kashmir, Karnataka, Punjab, Maharashtra and Kerala have prohibited the sale of e-cigarettes, though the sale of tobacco cigarettes remains legal.
At the same time, the Union Health Ministry has reportedly ruled that e-cigarettes are unacceptable in the light of what it sees as the findings of expert research concluding that these devices have cancer-causing properties, are highly addictive and do not offer a safer alternative to tobacco-based smoking products.
However, some health experts argue that such a stance creates a paradox because the government is allowing the sale of ‘lethal’ tobacco cigarettes while banning a substantially less harmful alternative.
Konstantinos E. Farsalinos, a research fellow at the Onassis Cardiac Surgery Centre in Athens, Greece, and a renowned expert on e-cigarettes, said that in his opinion banning these devices would be detrimental to the cause of public health. Farsalinos said such a ban would have adverse consequences because it would deprive Indian smokers of a substantially-less-harmful alternative to tobacco cigarettes.
Meanwhile, R.N. Sharan, professor at North-Eastern Hill University in Shillong, Meghalaya, said banning e-cigarettes was a hasty decision that could be counter-productive because the extent of e-cigarette use or its harm in India were not known.
September 4, 2017
Lives versus livelihoods
The Indian government has been investigating how Bloomberg Philanthropies funds local tobacco-control activities, according to a Reuters story relayed by the TMA and citing a note from last year drafted by the intelligence wing of the Ministry of Home Affairs.
The note was said to have raised concerns that the Bloomberg foundation was funding campaigns to ‘target’ Indian tobacco businesses and ‘aggressively’ lobby against the sector.
It said that while the foundation’s ‘claimed intention to free India of tobacco cannot be faulted’ given tobacco’s known risks, the industry generated US$5 billion in revenue annually and provided a livelihood for millions of people.
The three-page note, which was reportedly reviewed by Reuters, said also that ‘foreign interests making foreign contributions…for purposes of lobbying against an established economic activity raises multiple concerns’, such as creating an ‘adverse economic impact’ on 35 million people.
Since 2014, the Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government is said to have tightened surveillance of non-profit groups, saying they are acting against India’s national interests. Thousands of foreign-funded charities’ licenses have been canceled for misreporting donations.
The Reuters piece said that according to a senior government official aware of the investigation, the ministry’s note had been the reason for a rejection of a foreign funding license renewal of at least one Bloomberg-funded India charity in October 2016.
Some critics say the government is using the foreign funding law as a tool to silence non-profit groups which have raised concerns about the social costs of India’s rapid economic development.
August 30, 2017