US EDITION
COLUMNISTS
DIARY
SPECIALS
INTERVIEWS
CAPITAL BUZZ
REDIFF POLL
DEAR REDIFF
THE STATES
YEH HAI INDIA!
ELECTIONS
ARCHIVES

Search Rediff

Ex-MP drags cigarette companies to court

Former Lok Sabha member Murli S Deora has gone to court. Against cigarette smoking, which claims about a million lives in India every year.

His public interest litigation, filed through advocate Indira Jaisingh, also wants a Rs 5 billion compensation for the hazardous effects cigarettes have on consumers and people around them.

The defendants are the Central government, its various ministries and cigarette giants Indian Tobacco Corporation, VST Industries, Godfrey Philips and others.

The PIL sought invoking several articles of the Fundamental Rights and the Directive Principles of State Policy. Deora demanded urgent steps to combat the effects of tobacco, especially lung cancer, including a direction from the apex court for framing a national tobacco policy to address the manufacture, marketing, sale, advertisement, distribution and consumption of tobacco products, and plan for systematic shift from tobacco to other industries to ensure minimal labour displacement.

The compensation, sought from cigarette-makers, was required to offset the health hazards caused to the general public.

The petition said the compensation, which should be related to the market share or gross profits from sales of each tobacco manufacture to be paid annually, shall form the continuing corpus of the health care and awareness fund to be maintained by the Central government, or any authority constituted by it or the court.

A portion of that corpus would be allotted to the cash starved cancer hospitals and research centres.

The PIL also sought strict quality control measures at the manufacturing stage. It pointed out that after the litigation against cigarette companies in the United States, whereby they had to pay billions of dollars in damages, the companies had shifted their operations to third world countries like India.

Deora demanded that smoking be banned at all public places, including government buildings, community halls, stadiums and modes of transport, all over the country. The statutory warning should be stricter.

All advertisements in the media designed to lure or encourage minors to take to tobacco products should be prohibited, he said.

UNI

Tell us what you think of this report