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Is tobacco lobby too strong, asks
Indian Supreme Court
WSN Network
New Delhi: The
Supreme Court on Monday wondered whether the tobacco lobby was ‘too
strong’ to stall attempts by the government to bring into force
rules that made it mandatory for cigarette manufacturers to print
the nicotine, tar and carbon monoxide content of each stick on all
packets.
PIL petitioner
Narinder Sharma argued that though the rules pertaining to
amendments in Tobacco Control Act were to come into force from
February this year, they first got deferred to June and then again
to a date not made public by the government.
A Bench
comprising Chief Justice K G Balakrishnan and Justices R V
Raveendran and V S Sirpurkar, taking advantage of the presence of
additional solicitor-general Gopal Subramaniam, asked: ‘‘Mr ASG, the
tobacco lobby appears to be too strong.’’
Subramaniam
said a similar petition was pending before another Bench of the
court and said it would be better if this petition was tagged along
with it for a joint hearing. The Bench agreed to this.
Sharma said
every developed country had made it mandatory for cigarette
manufacturers to make the smoker aware of the quantity of tar,
nicotine and carbon monoxide he was inhaling by lighting each
cigarette.
He alleged that
the government was making a lame excuse that the country did not
have the equipment to measure the tar, nicotine and carbon monoxide
content in a cigarette even though the companies producing the
machinery abroad are operating in India.
Notably, the
Sikhs are known the world over as complete non-smokers.
10 October, 2007
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