Panaji: In a letter to Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, the National Organisation for Tobacco Eradication (NOTE) has demanded ban on all forms of tobacco in phase manner.
“While we appreciate this news to ban e-cigarettes, we urge you to go a little further and ban all forms of tobacco itself since tobacco is harmful and injurious to health leading to the dreaded disease of Cancer leading to thousands of deaths and impacting negatively thousands of families,” NOTE General Secretary Dr Shekhar Salkar said in a letter to the minister.
He also stated that tobacco has become an industry which employs thousands of people and thousands of families are fed by the income generated, hence it should be banned in phase manner.
“It’s not possible at one go as thousands of farmers are dependent on this cash crop and lots of employment is generated by this industry. Therefore it is not easy to ban it immediately but it can be done in a phased manner and we strongly feel that it should be and can be completely banned by the year 2050,” he said.
Urging ban on all forms of tobacco, NOTE suggested that government must have a long term strategy to give incentive to farmers for shifting from tobacco crop with cash subsidy by the year 2030, disband tobacco promotion board immediately, give incentive to industry if they want to diversify in other business by the year 2035, employees to be given good voluntarily retirement schemes or absorb them in the parent company having diversified business, strong movement for helping people in quitting tobacco, like Motor Vehicles Act, increase fines under COTPA Act 2013; and disinvest equity from the tobacco companies immediately, etc.
