Mumbai/Kolkata/Hyderabad: The Union ministry of health and family welfare has deferred its plan to enforce legislation that stipulates printing of pictorial warning on beedi packets and tobacco products by six months, giving a breather to the beedi industry that employs 10 million workers across the country.
Beedi is a type of cheap Indian cigarette in which tobacco is rolled in tendu leaves.
Job insecurity: Women labourers making beedis in West Bengal. The beedi industry warned last month that as many as one million workers, mostly women, are set to lose their jobs in the next few months. Rupak De Chowdhuri / Reuters
The ministry had in September announced that embellishing
beedi and tobacco product packets with pictorial warnings will be mandatory from 1 December. The move, part of the ministry’s anti-smoking strategy, was an attempt to reach out to illiterate customers who cannot read the statutory warnings currently printed on packs.
The All India Beedi Industry Federation had last month said that as many as one million workers, mostly women, employed in the industry will lose their jobs in the next few months as a recent ban on smoking in public places, together with the display of pictorial warnings on packs, will discourage tobacco consumption, triggering a fall in sales.
The government is yet to finalize the picture to be used in the pictorial warning—a skull with crossed bones, a scorpion, or a picture depicting diseased lungs. But this is not what led the ministry to defer implementation of pictorial warnings. Actually, the notification dated 28 November does not cite any reason.
The six-month deferment is significant as two of the largest beedi manufacturing areas in the country—Jangipur in West Bengal and Gondia in Maharashtra—are associated with Union minister for external affairs, Pranab Mukherjee, and civil aviation minister Praful Patel, respectively. While Mukherjee represents Jangipur in Lok Sabha, Patel, a member of Rajya Sabha, hails from Gondia.
Jangipur, in Murshidabad district, is home to 700,000 beedi-rollers, the biggest beedi manufacturing centre in India, while Gondia has about 60,000 workers in eight beedi manufacturing units including those owned by the CeeJay Group of Praful Patel.
Relaxation of norms for the tobacco industry could be a strategic move by the government ahead of the general election next year as the beedi workers constitute a large vote bank. The other states which house important beedi production centres are Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka. There are about a million beedi workers in Andhra Pradesh and 800,000 in Karnataka spread across coastal districts of Dakshina Kannada and Udupi, besides Belgaum, Davanagere, Mysore and Bangalore.