Cigarette, bidi cos win a year’s reprieve on warnings

Giving in to the demand of the tobacco industry, the government on Tuesday decided to retain the existing pictorial warnings on cigarette and bidi packages for one more year. The decision taken at a meeting of the Cabinet comes a week after tobacco majors like ITC and Godfrey Phillips India (GPI) stopped production due to uncertainty.

The Cabinet has decided to retain the current pictorial warnings for one more year, after which it will be reviewed in December 2011, sources said. The existing pictorial warnings —a scorpion on bidipacks and a cancer-affected lung on cigarette packs — were to be replaced by a canceraffected mouth, from December 1 after a notification by the ministry of health and family welfare in May this year. Such warnings are to be rotated every year.

Reacting to the government’s decision, Tobacco Institute of India director Udayan Lall said: “We will abide by the decision the government has taken.”

Godfrey Phillips India (GPI) vicepresident marketing Neeta Kapur said the company will start production of cigarettes at its two units in India “within a couple of days” . An ITC spokesperson said, “We have heard this from the media and can comment only after seeing the notification.”

Tobacco companies, which were under an impression that the timeline for ‘mouth cancer’ warning would get pushed back, had made representations to the health ministry requesting for increasing the number of years for implementing particular pictograms from existing one year to two to three years at least. They reasoned out that existing cigarette stock lying with the retailers could not be withdrawn and re-manufactured and this may account to huge losses to them.

The manufacturers requested that they be first allowed to sell the previous stock and that if the new warning must come into effect then its duration should be increased to two or three years so that companies do not need to print new packets every year.