The Union government on Wednesday assured the Supreme Court that it would make it mandatory for cigarette manufacturers to print the pictorial warning on cigarette packs.
The government undertaking follows the court’s anguish at the government’s failure to take any step to check the cancerous growth of smoking. Earlier, former health minister Anbumani Ramadoss had alleged that a Group of Ministers (GoM) committee on display of pictorial warnings on tobacco products, headed by external affair minister Pranab Mukherjee, purposefully diluted the ministry’s decision on pictorial warnings.
Petitioner Health for Millions complained that though the government brought in the Cigarette and Other Tobacco Products (Packaging and Labelling) Rules in 2006, making it mandatory for all tobacco products to display statutory pictorial warnings, “It was not implemented so far under pressure from the tobacco lobby”.
Under the 2006 rules, the government planned to display “Skull and bones” besides a dead body on the packages and labels. But now, pictures of diseased lungs for cigarettes and a scorpion for other tobacco products will be used, along with the warning Smoking Kills or Tobacco Kills. Additional solicitor general Gopal Subramanium assured a bench of justices BN Agrawal and GS Singhvi of enforcing the government’s intent. Forty percent of a cigarette packet would carry the pictorial warning. The warnings will be inscribed in the language used on the pack. In certain case the warnings will appear in two languages – in which the brand name appears and in any one of the languages on the packs.
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Source: DNA
