Chennai : Former Union Health Minister and PMK leader Anbumani Ramadoss, an NDA ally, on Friday said that he had been a ‘victim’ of the tobacco lobby and sought Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s intervention for increasing the size of pictorial warnings on tobacco products to 85% as planned earlier.
The NDA government’s decision to increase pictorial warnings on packets of tobacco products to 85% from the existing 40% space from April 1, which earned India international acclaim, has been put on hold indefinitely.
Ramadoss dismissed arguments against increasing the size of pictorial warnings on cigarette packets as being ‘ignorant’ and ‘foolish’. “It is high time the Prime Minister intervened. I appeal to him to order the Health Ministry to increase pictorial warning to 85% immediately,” the PMK founder leader said.
Terming the tobacco lobby as one of the most powerful, he alleged it ‘instigated’ employees to speak against such proposed rules on the ground that they would ‘hurt’ the employees in tobacco growing and beedi manufacturing firms. “I was myself a victim of this lobby,” he said without elaborating. Ramadoss was the Health Minister in the Manmohan Singh Cabinet from May, 2004 till he resigned his post in April 2009.
He also took note of the statements of an MP who stated that there are no studies in India to link tobacco use with cancer, to which another Parliamentarian had said that by using the same logic, sugar should be banned.
BJP MP and chairman of a parliamentary panel Dilip Gandhi had said there were “no India-specific studies” to link cancer to tobacco use, while party MP Shyama Charan Gupta had said that “sugar causes diabetes” and it should be banned by the same logic.
