Smoking out Tobacco
- Hueiyen Lanpao Editorial :: February 16, 2013 -

Tobacco products which are widely in use in the State :: Pix - TSE

Paving the way for Manipur to become the latest Indian State to ban tobacco products, State Cabinet has decided to impose ban on sale and consumption of all tobacco products in the State.

The decision to ban sale and consumption of tobacco products including cigarette, Gutka, Khaini, Zarda, etc, was taken during a meeting of the State Cabinet chaired by Chief Minister O Ibobi Singh in the evening of February 14.

We assume that the decision to impose a blanket ban on tobacco products in the State may have been prompted by the fact that Manipur accounts for some of the highest burden of tobacco related illness in the entire country.

According to the Global Adults Tobacco Survey (GATS) Fact-sheet of Manipur, 2009-2010 which was released recently at Imphal, 54 percent of the total population in Manipur (66.6 percent men and 41.8 percent women) is using tobacco products in general while 44 percent of the population is into smokeless or chewing tobacco products like Gutka, Khaini, Zarda, etc which are responsible for the high incidence of oral cancer cases in this tiny hilly State.

It is said that about 930 to 950 new cases of cancer are reported annually in Manipur, out of which about 390 are tobacco related cases. That accounts to 34 percent of the total cancer cases in the State.

After Madhya Pradesh, which became the first State to ban Gutka in India since April, 2011, other States like Kerala, Bihar, Maharashtra, Himachal Pradesh, Rajasthan, Haryana, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, Punjab, Uttarakhand, Mizoram, Delhi, Sikkim, Andhra Pradesh, Odisha, Nagaland, and the Union Territory of Chandigarh have followed suit with ban on sale, manufacture and distribution of tobacco products in one form or the other.

However, in some of these States, the ban has been confined to only smokeless tobacco.

This has raised some serious questions on the rationality of allowing the cigarette manufacturing companies, which have enough clout and money to secure the support of top politicians-cum-lawyers in courts, to thrive at the cost of their poor cousin companies manufacturing Gutka and other smokeless tobacco products.

The contestation is plain and simple, if any ban or regulation is to be enforced in the interest of preventing health risks from tobacco products, then it should not be made applicable to all tobacco products, regardless of whether they are smokeless or not.

After all, smoking kills too. In fact, in case of smoking cigarette, it is not just the smoker himself or herself who gets killed but also all those who are unwittingly exposed to the harmful effect of cigarette as passion smokers.

Taking into consideration of this fact, it is good that the State Cabinet has decided to ban all kinds of tobacco products at one go, thus showing its commitment towards realization of a tobacco free society.

Nonetheless, the real breakthrough in the battle against tobacco could come only when the ban is enforced effectively. Otherwise, it would become much ado about nothing.