The name plates of several other shops also doubled up as advertisement boards of particular brand of cigarettes/tobacco. No wonder the compliance score of direct and indirect TAPS (tobacco advertisement, promotion and sponsorship) bans is 5 again.
While pictorial and text health-warning labels cover 40% of the front panel of the package, and there is ban on the use of misleading descriptors/graphics, there is no requirement for qualitative statements about constituents and emissions. All the tobacco-shop owners I spoke with felt that the present so-called scary pictorial health warnings have not had any effect on most customers, as they are addicted to the product. Their common refrain is--as it is we have to die one day, so why not eat and enjoy. The sellers also felt that though people know that tobacco is bad for health, yet they eat it.
While COTPA forbids sale of tobacco products to and by minors, I came across several paan shop sellers who were minors, who had either taken over after their father's death or were managing the shop part-time. Most shop owners (minor and adults) also feigned ignorance about the existence of any tobacco-control laws.
So as we continue our efforts with renewed vigour to influence tobacco users/smokers to quit, we need to educate the lakhs of paan shop owners (who peddle this poison) about the existing tobacco-control laws at least, so that ignorance no longer remains bliss for them.
Shobha Shukla, Citizen News Service (CNS)
(The author is the Managing Editor of CNS. She is a J2J Fellow of National Press Foundation (NPF) USA and received her editing training in Singapore. She has earlier worked with State Planning Institute, UP and taught physics at India's prestigious Loreto Convent. She also co-authored and edited publications on childhood TB, childhood pneumonia, Hepatitis C Virus and HIV, violence against women and girls, and MDR-TB. Email: shobha@citizen-news.org, website: www.citizen-news.org)
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