Govt mulls raising age for tobacco use to 21

Aditi Tandon
Tribune News Service
New Delhi, September 19

After promulgating the ordinance to ban e-cigarettes, the government is pursuing to raise the legal age for tobacco consumption from the current 18 years to 21.

The Health Ministry is currently working on comprehensive amendments to the Cigarettes and Other Tobacco Products (Prohibition of Advertisement and Regulation of Trade) Act, 2003, the national anti-tobacco legislation. The aim is to introduce the amendment Bill in the next session of Parliament.

Sources said the exercise was being undertaken to make the Indian anti-tobacco law fully compliant with the UN Framework Convention on Tobacco Control to which India is a signatory.

Other changes to COTPA being mulled are ban on the sale of loose cigarette sticks, at least a five-fold hike in fine for smoking in public places (from the current Rs 200 to Rs 1,000), making offences under the law cognisable and imposing a ban on advertisement of tobacco on points of sale such as kiosks.

Amendments  to COTPA were attempted in 2015 also when the government had constituted a high-level committee to suggest changes. When that Bill was placed in public domain, the ministry received 10,000 emails plus written responses to the extent that it had to hire people to sift through those. “Even storage of public responses has become a challenge. We had 60 sacks of written responses,” said a source adding that the exercise was severely impeded at that time.

There is now a fresh push to address tobacco use with the new National Health Policy identifying the area as one of the seven priority sectors. The government last year also constituted a Nasha Mukti Taskforce to review regulatory provisions around all forms of tobacco — smokeless and smoking.

The groundwork for amendments to COTPA is already available with the 2015 high-level government committee having studied the subject deeply. The committee has wanted the legal age for tobacco consumption in India raised from 18 to 25 years. “There is thinking in the government that the legal age for tobacco use should be raised to least 21 years,” a source said.

Drop in no. of users

• 10% of Indian population smokes cigarettes
• Percentage of users has declined by six between 2009 and 2016, according to the Global Adult Tobacco Survey for India
• As of 2016, 28.6 per cent Indians used tobacco in some form. Of these, 70 per cent used chewing tobacco

Amendments...

• Ban on the sale of loose cigarette sticks
• Rs 1,000 fine on smoking in public places
• Making offences under the law cognisable 
• Ban on advertisement of tobacco on points of sale