Supreme Court Ban on Tobacco Sachets useless for reducing Oral Cancer Deaths

By- Ranjan Baruah | Date- April 16, 2011 | Place- New Delhi

The Supreme Court denied to lift the ban on the sale of tobacco products in plastic sachets and asked the central government to file its reply to petitions challenging the ban. The Ban which came into effect from March 1 was challenged by the manufacturers of chewing tobacco and certain NGOs.

The tobacco manufacturers in their petitions had claimed that the rules banning the use of plastic sachets for packaging their tobacco products was biased. However, the apex court comprising of Justice G.S. Singhvi and K.S. Radhakrishnan refused to lift the ban.

It is to be mentioned that the Supreme Court has taken the decision to ban sale of tobacco products in plastic sachets because of the figures from the recently conducted report on the use of tobacco by the National Institute of Public Health (NIPH). This report showed that in India, 90% of Oral cancer cases were due to chewing tobacco and in fact 86% of the oral cancer cases in the world itself occurred in India.

However it is to be noted that the ban is on sale of tobacco products in plastic sachets, and not on the tobacco product itself. Alarmed by the figures of the NIPH report on use of tobacco, the Supreme Court found it realistic only to ban the packaging of tobacco products in plastic sachets. There is no ban on the tobacco products and it is yet unclear how just the way of changing the packaging would bring in health reforms in the country or how it would bring down the thousands of people dying out of oral cancer every year. The only good side of this ban is the fact that discontinuation of plastic would help the environment.

What would best happen as a result of this ban on plastic sachets is that now the manufacturers of tobacco would be using alternate packaging strategies to market their products. This alternate arrangement would involve more cost for the manufacturers and hence the price of tobacco products are expected to go up, probably even double or triple of current costs.

The directive by Supreme Court has, in reality, taken no consideration of facts like 24% of school going children is addicted to tobacco products like Gutkha, Pan Masala, etc. If India needs an improvement in Oral cancer records or to save people from being victims of Oral cancer, there has to be sever and strict measures put in place to ban tobacco products itself and not just banning a simple packaging system.