Up in smoke

The smoker's natural habitat has been shrinking for some time now, as puffing is declared taboo in one public, as also private, place aft...

The smoker’s natural habitat has been shrinking for some time now, as puffing is declared taboo in one public, as also private, place after another. But now his resourcefulness is being put to another test with Railway Minister Nitish Kumar announcing a blanket ban on the sale of cigarettes and bidis on trains and railway platforms.

Grabbing the daily pack with a pileful of reading matter before hopping on to the train will clearly be a thing of the past on June 5, 1999, and a smoker’s itinerary will have to be more logistically planned, involving as it will hoarding of the banned commodity before entering the pristine railway properties. And given the fact that smoking has virtually been deemed a turn-of-the-century crime against humanity, this step is bound to be heartily welcomed by all except the tobacco industry — that is, once the implications of the fare hikes in the Railway Budget sink in.

But will this clear the country’s countless railway platforms and compartments of a carcinogenic haze?Though the grave health risks posed by passive smoking have been exhaustively and conclusively documented, the mere unavailability of cigarettes and bidis on trains and platforms may not necessarily translate into a benign, smoke-free environment.

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Some years ago the sale of paan and betel leaves too had been similarly banned, but one would be hard pressed to find a railway platform not splattered with red paan stains. In fact, forget the extremely tenuous link between a product’s sale on the platform and its consumption there, the very enforceability of such a scheme is somewhat doubtful. Having said that, any step aimed at curbing smoking is bound to be beneficial, no matter how tangentially.

For, each attempt to curb tobacco consumption inevitably becomes part of public debate and results in a more heated reiteration of the otherwise largely unread surgeon’s warning stamped on cigarette packets and advertisements. With the number of young smokers increasing dramatically, this sensitisation to thenon-smoker’s rights — as too to the ill-effects of tobacco — cannot be underplayed.

No wonder, then, that the tobacco industry is worried about this new onslaught — a worry mirrored by the fall in prices of tobacco scrips on Thursday. It is estimated that railway platform and onboard sales account for anywhere between 5 and 10 per cent of the total cigarette sales in India. And while tobacco majors launch into politically correct free-market jargon like “the consumer’s right to choice”, their apprehensions are understandable.

Tobacco multinationals have already been hit badly by sustained awareness campaigns and debilitating class action suits in the West and are seeking to make up falling turnovers by shoring up their bottomlines in developing nations. In fact, in a couple of years the South is expected to account for 70 per cent of global smokers. No doubt, these companies will come up with innovative ways of getting the pack of cigarettes to willing smokers; but surely they cannot avoid nigglingdoubts about that old adage: out of sight, out of mind.