Tag: India

  • Smokeless ban struck down

    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.

  • Tobacco losing out in India

    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.

  • Flue-cured prices up sharply

    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.

  • Cigarette butts a resource

    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.

  • Tobacco travel ban

    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.

  • Bans counter-productive

    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.

  • Lives versus livelihoods

    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.

  • Smoke-free in Kashmir

    Smoke-free in Kashmir

    The government of the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) has achieved a major success against tobacco with the Ladakh region’s Leh district having been declared a tobacco-free zone, according to a story by Samaan Lateef for the Chandigarh Tribune.

    With the aim of making Kashmir a smoke-free region, the Directorate of Health Services Kashmir (DHSK) under the National Tobacco Control Programme (NTCP) started an anti-tobacco campaign in Leh early this year.

    “Due to mass awareness and meetings with civil society members, religious and women[’s] groups, we have been successful in making Leh a tobacco-free zone,” Dr. Rehana Kousar, who is in-charge of the NTCP, Kashmir, reportedly told The Tribune.

    However, Kousar said a major success was achieved because of the involvement of women in the anti-tobacco campaign. “The Women’s Alliance is a strong lobby for social change in Leh and its members made the difference in making the region free of tobacco,” she said.

    The department had conducted more than 30 awareness camps in schools to ensure the campaign had a long-term impact on Leh society, Kousar said.

    And she added that tobacco vendors had been ‘sanitized to stop the sale of tobacco, particularly to minors and around schools’.

    According to official data, the incidence of tobacco use in J&K is 26.6 percent, a figure that is said to include cigarette smokers (12.0 percent) and bidi smokers (3.8 percent).

    Of the total tobacco users, 41.6 percent are men and 10.3 percent are women.

    The average age at the daily initiation of tobacco use is 17.3 years.

    Spurred on by the success in Leh, the health department is all set to replicate the campaign in other districts.

    DHSK director Dr Saleem-ur Rehman said the anti-tobacco campaign would cover other areas for which public support was needed. “It is not only assignment and motivation of enforcement agencies, but ensuring public awareness and political will to ensure [a] tobacco-free Kashmir,” Rehman said.

  • BEST knows best

    BEST knows best

    The Brihanmumbai Electric Supply & Transport (BEST) Undertaking of Mumbai, India, is due to begin an initiative to ‘free itself of tobacco addiction’, according to a Mid-day.com story relayed by the TMA.

    The company is planning to install drop boxes for cigarettes and gutka in each of its buses.

    And it has said it will enforce a new personnel policy requiring employees to quit tobacco ‘before they can progress in their careers’.

    The personnel program is due to implement a five-point policy covering ‘recruitment and promotions, free medical consultations and other support for employees trying to quit, and penalties for those that give up’. [Presumably the penalties are brought down on the heads of those that give up trying to give up].

    Roughly 40 percent of the BEST workforce is said to be ‘addicted to tobacco’.

  • E-cig ban opposed

    E-cig ban opposed

    The Tobacco Institute of India (TII) has come out against a proposed ban on electronic cigarettes, according to an Indo-Asian News Service (IANS) report.

    The Health Ministry of India is considering such a ban after an expert committee said that these devices had cancer-causing properties.

    The TII says that a ban on e-cigarettes could increase the smuggling of these products, and that such an increase could have consequences for quality standards and the health of the people using them.

    The IANS story quoted the TII as saying that 160 countries signed up to the World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, including the US, the UK, and EU member states, had not imposed a prohibition on electronic cigarettes.

    And Canada and New Zealand, which had earlier prohibited such products, had reversed their decisions.

    The TII said the prohibition of e-cigarettes would benefit illegal traders and promote foreign products owned by overseas entities.